KASHMIR

KASHMIR
R O O T S O F C O N F L I C T,
PAT H S TO P E AC E

Sumantra Bose

H A R VA R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
2003

Copyright 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

all rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bose, Sumantra, 1968
Kashmir : roots of conict, paths to peace / Sumantra Bose.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-01173-2 (alk. paper)
1. Jammu and Kashmir (India)History19th century.
2. Jammu and Kashmir (India)Politics and government19th century.
3. IndiaForeign relationsPakistan.
4. PakistanForeign relationsIndia.
I. Title.
DS485.K23B67 2003
954.6dc21
2003049919

For the people of Jammu and Kashmir

and in honor of
Subhas Chandra Bose (18971945)
Sarat Chandra Bose (18891950)
Sisir Kumar Bose (19202000)

CONTENTS

Maps
Introduction

viii
1

1. Origins of the Conict

14

2. The Kashmir-India Debacle

44

3. The War in Kashmir

102

4. Sovereignty in Dispute

164

5. Pathways to Peace

201

Notes

267

Glossary

291

Acknowledgments

299

Index

301

XINJIANG

Khunjerab Pass

K U S H

U
N D
H I

Area ceded by
Pakistan to
China in 1963

Baltit

Sh

ak

Gilgit

N O R T H E R N
D

A
AZ

Y
A Banihal Pass
L
R A
Ch
N
en

ab

Rajouri

Anantnag

I
P

lum
Jhe

IR

Zojila
Pass
SRINAGAR

Poonch

Udhampur
Akhnur

JAMMU

PUNJAB

Jhel Baramulla
um

Mangla
Dam Mirpur
Jhelum

Jhelu

Kargil

Wular
Lake
Sopore

ISLAMABAD
Rawalpindi

IR

Abbottabad

I Skardu
M
T
N
S

MUZAFFARABAD

AMM U & K
D J
AS
H

NORTH-WEST
FRONTIER
PROVI NCE

am

A R E A S

Boundary claimed by India;

de facto provincial boundary for Pakistan

In du s

sg

Ch

en

ab

Sialkot

Chamba

Kathua

t
ko
an
h
t
Pa

HIMAC

Delhi / New Delhi

PA

Mumbai
(Bombay)

r
Ya

n
ka d

Selected towns and villages

Capitals appear in caps.

Ar a b i a n
Se a

B.

Karakoram Pass

BANGLADESH

Ba y o f
Bengal

KUN

akash
K a r Hajji Langar

Chennai

L U N (Madras)
MTN
S
SRI
LANKA

300 Miles

SODA
PLATEAU
400 Kilometers

n
he
ac er
Si aci
.
Gl
OR
OR
LT
SA

A k s a i

NJ9842

NE

C h i n

Line of Control agreed to by India and

Pakistan in 1972, replacing similar
Cease-fire Line of 1949
In d
us
Leh

T I B E T
R
A
N
G

E
0

HAL

PRADESH

20

40

60

50 miles
Gar
Dzong
80 100 kilometers

MAR

MA)

S
KI
PA

UR

Srinagar

Islamabad

Karachi

Cities (>100,000 pop. in 1981)

THE REGIONAL
SETTING
C H I N A

YA
N

H A Kabul

I.

KASHMIR

(B

De facto, demarcated
De facto, undemarcated
Line of Control (de facto,
undemarcated)
Claimed, but not de facto
Internal Divisions
Mazar
State (India), Province (Pak.)

TA
NI S

AF

TA J

U.

TURKMENISTAN

JAMMU AND
KASHMIR
International Boundaries

NORTHERN
AREAS
M

IR

F CONTROL
EO
IL N

KA

N.W.F.P.

Kupwara

Bandipora

Handwara

&

Gulmarg

IR

Uri
Bagh

J A L
R A Banihal Pass
N G
Kishtwar
E
Ch
en

Bhimbar

ab

A
I

na

Doda

Reasi

Akhnur

e
Ch

A Z A D

Awantipora
Tral
Bijbehara
Anantnag

Rajouri

Mirpur

Jhelum

Kotli

elu

I R

Shopian

Pahlgam

Jh

Rawalakot

Surankote

Mangla
Dam

SRINAGAR
Pampore

Badgam

Poonch

Zojila
Pass

Ganderbal

JAMMU

Baramulla

um

Sopore

Jh e l

H
D A K
L A

Wular
Lake

MUZAFFARABAD

R
JAMMU

Udhampur Taw i

Sialkot
Kathua

PUNJAB
0
0

Pathankot

30 miles
Gujranwala
20

40 kilometers

N
PU

JA

KASHMIR

INTRODUCTION

In our search for a lasting solution to the Kashmir problem,

both in its external and internal dimensions, we shall not
traverse solely on the beaten track of the past. Mindsets will
have to be altered and historical baggage jettisoned.
a t a l b e h a r i va j p aye e,
prime minister of India, January 2002
If we want to normalize relations between Pakistan and India and bring harmony to the region, the Kashmir dispute
will have to be resolved peacefully through a dialogue, on
the basis of the aspirations of the Kashmiri people. Solving the Kashmir issue is the joint responsibility of our two
countries . . . Mr Vajpayee, . . . I take you up on this offer.
Let us start talking in this spirit.
g e n e r a l p e r ve z mu s h a r r a f,
president of Pakistan, January 2002

uring the rst half of 2002, India and Pakistan mobilized their armed forces in apparent preparation for war,
sparking concern in Western capitals and in the international media that a potentially catastrophic conict was imminent between
two countries armed with huge conventional arsenals and some
nuclear weapons. The confrontation focused worldwide attention
on the dispute between India and Pakistan over the territory of
Jammu and Kashmir ( J&K), often called simply Kashmir. The dispute is as old as the two states themselves, dating back to the circumstances of their independence from Britain and the partition
of the subcontinent in 1947. Since the end of the rst India-Pakistan war over Kashmir in January 1949, the territory has been divided into Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir (IJK, comprising
the regions of the Kashmir Valley, Jammu, and Ladakh), with approximately 10 million people, and a smaller area under Pakistani
control (Azad Jammu and Kashmir, or AJK, plus sparsely populated regions in the high Himalayas known as Pakistans Northern
Areas), with perhaps 3 million.
The dividing line between IJK and AJKNorthern Areas, which
originated as a ceasere line in 1949 and was marginally altered
during India-Pakistan wars in 1965 and 1971, was renamed the Line
of Control (LOC) by India-Pakistan agreement in July 1972. During the summer of 1999 a limited war between Indian and Pakistani forces occurred along a particularly mountainous stretch of
the LOC after units of the Pakistani army crossed the line and occupied strategic heights on the Indian side. After two months of
erce combat and some gradual gains by India, the Pakistanis re-

I N T R O D U C T I O N
3

luctantly withdrew after an agreement to that effect between U.S.

President Bill Clinton and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.1
A major change differentiated 1972 from 1999, however. As a
publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
put it in 1995: Before 1989, India and Pakistan fought over Kashmir. Since late 1989, it is Kashmiris who have done [much of] the
ghtingand most of the dying.2 In early 1990 a group of young
men in the Kashmir Valley launched a guerrilla revolt against
Indian rule under the banner of a movement calling itself the
Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front ( JKLF). The JKLFs stated
objective was to liberate IJK and reunite it with Pakistani Kashmir
as a single independent state. The JKLF nucleus in IJK had received weapons and training from a JKLF organization located
across the border in AJK, as well as from Pakistani military agencies. They were stunned by the enthusiastic popular response their
makeshift insurrection received from the people of the Kashmir
Valley. The militants were aware of widespread, deep-rooted grievance against India, but they were still taken by surprise by the intensity of mass support for azaadi (freedom), expressed in huge
pro-independence demonstrations in the Valley during 1990.3 The
guerrilla war rapidly intensied, to a signicant degree because of
an Indian response of repression and reprisal targeted not just
against armed militants but frequently also against disloyal civilian communities that aided and sheltered the rebels. The independentist, Muslim but secularist JKLFs dominance of the uprising yielded by 19921993 to the rise of a pro-Pakistan, moderate
Islamist guerrilla group called Hizb-ul Mujahideen, strongly promoted by Pakistani military authorities.
The struggle continued to evolve. By the mid-1990s the intensity of local support for the insurgency had waned to some extent,

and in the second half of the decade pan-Islamist ghters, primarily from Pakistan, inltrated into IJK in signicant numbers, adding a supra-local, strongly Islamist avor to the conict. In the India-Pakistan wars of 19471948, 1965, and 1971, sizeable numbers
of J&K residents had fought on the Kashmir fronts as soldiers and
auxiliaries for both armies. But protracted low-intensity warfare
in the interior of IJK between thousands of guerrillas and hundreds of thousands of Indian security forces signaled a great transformation in the military and political character of the Kashmir
conict, marking its transition from a stubborn dispute over real
estate between two adversarial neighbors to a much more complex, multidimensional problem.
From 1989 to 2002, between 40,000 (ofcial Indian estimates)
and 80,000 (claimed by the Hurriyat Conference, a coalition of
pro-independence and pro-Pakistan groups) civilians, guerrilla ghters, and Indian security personnel died in violence that gradually
spread beyond the Kashmir Valley to affect most of Jammu, IJKs
other populous region. According to Indian counterinsurgency
sources, in this period, more than 4,600 security personnel were
killed, along with about 13,500 civilians (the vast majority Muslims) and 15,937 militants (the term for guerrilla ghters) including approximately 3,000 from outside IJK, mostly Pakistanis and
some Afghans. Also in this period, 55,538 incidents of violence
were recorded and Indian forces engaged in counterinsurgency
operations captured around 40,000 rearms, 150,000 explosive devices, and over 6 million rounds of assorted ammunition.4
Statistics, even as remarkable as these, cannot adequately portray the trauma and tragedy that have overwhelmed Kashmir,
once a prime tourist destination because of its temperate Himalayan climate and scenic beauty. Life in a society under daily siege is
powerfully expressed in the tortured works of a new generation

I N T R O D U C T I O N
5

of Kashmirs writers. Shakeel Shan writes about a friend who

went missing in the Valley one night, abducted, in a routine occurrence, by unidentied gunmen:
Who knows where my friend is?
Who knows where my friend is hiding?
Who knows whether he is scared of the dark night?
Who knows whether he is hungry and unable to stand
on his feet?
Who knows whether the place where he sits is not
damp?

Bashir Manzar writes about the fear that grips a society in the
throes of protracted warfare:
Break the pen, spill the ink, burn the paper
Lock your lips, be silent, shhh . . .
Say I saw nothing even if you did
Or else have your eyes gouged out
Keep humming eulogies, be silent
It is the season of burying the truth . . .

Another young writer, who prefers to remain anonymous for his

own safety, expresses himself as follows:
I cant drink water because I feel it is mixed with the
blood of young men who die up in the mountains. I
cant look at the sky because it is no longer blue, it is
painted red. I cant listen to the roar of the gushing
stream, it reminds me of the wailing mother next to the
bullet-riddled body of her only son. I cant listen to the
thunder of the clouds, it reminds me of a bomb blast. I
feel the green of my garden has faded, perhaps it too

mourns. The sparrow and cuckoo are silent, perhaps

they too are sad.

Kashmirs best-known contemporary poet, Agha Shahid Ali, who

died as an expatriate in the United States in 2001, expressed a little
more hope from his deathbed, in a poem dedicated to a Kashmiri
Hindu friend:
We shall meet again, in Srinagar
By the gates of the Villa of Peace
Our hands blossoming into sts
Till the soldiers return the keys
And disappear.5

The dual purpose of this book is to explain how the Kashmir conict has come to present such a grave threat to South Asias peace
and to global security in the early twenty-rst century, and to shed
light on what can be done about this situation. I intentionally
move beyond a preoccupation with the origins of the Kashmir
conict and its inter-state territorial dimension, topics that have
been the focus of most literature on Kashmir over the past fty
years. I do not argue that the genesis of the conict is unimportant, nor do I deny that the dispute between India and Pakistan
over the contested territory is the crux of the problem. I do argue,
however, that the contemporary Kashmir conictparticularly
the strife in IJK, the central aspect of the problem and the primary
focus of this bookhas much more to do with events that have
unfolded in the decades since 1947 than with those of 1947 itself. I
also argue that an adequate understanding of the Kashmir conict
must widen its focus beyond the inter-state territorial dispute to

I N T R O D U C T I O N
7

take account of the great diversity and complexity of society and

politics within Jammu and Kashmir.
To convey the essence and the complexity of the conict as effectively as possible, I try (especially in Chapter 3) to tell the story
from the vantage point of those on the ground in Jammu and
Kashmir. To do so, I draw on my personal experience over the
past decade in numerous localities and frontiers of armed conict
in the three regions of IJK, and on interviews I conducted during
my visits there.
The book is structured around three key points and emphases.
First, I stress that the roots of the crisis that erupted in 19891990
lie in a post-1947 history of denial of democratic rights and institutions to the people of J&K, particularly those of IJK. This is not
simply an academic point. Reframing the Kashmir question as a
challenge for democratic politics and statecraft implies that real and
relevant methods of democratic institutionalization and conict
resolution can potentially be brought into play, and that Kashmir
is not inevitably doomed to remain trapped in a zero-sum conict
of antagonistic nationalisms.
In other words, a subtly different denition of self-determination, one that downgrades the fulllment of national(ist) claims
and destinies and upgrades the right of people to live and be
governed in accordance with democratic norms, can potentially
provide the space for the negotiation of an institutional design
which is a compromise between rival, maximalist conceptions of
self-determination. In 1929 it was observed that the Jammu and
Kashmir State is laboring under many disadvantages, with a large
Mohameddan population . . . practically governed like dumbdriven cattle. There is no touch between the Government and the
people, no suitable opportunity for representing grievances, and
the administrative machinery itself requires overhauling from top

to bottom . . . It has at present little or no sympathy with the peoples wants and grievances.6 Thus the slogan of the rst organized political movement in modern Kashmir, which emerged
during the 1930s in response to this state of affairs, was Responsible Government: government accountable to and in the interests
of the citizenry. As we shall see, that agenda of institutionalizing
responsible government remains unrealized seven decades later,
and Kashmirs people have not yet made the transition from being
subjects to being citizens. The only way to enable them to make
this transition is to make up the democratic decit.
My second point is one of caution and circumspection: achieving a lasting democratic solution is obviously far easier said than
done. This is, rst, because India and Pakistan have chosen since
1947 to make possession of Kashmir the cornerstone of their respective identities as states. Indian ofcial ideology has claimed
that Indias identity as an inclusive, secular state would be grievously damaged without IJK, the only Muslim-majority unit of
the Indian Union. Why retention of Kashmir, apparently by any
means necessary, should be indispensable to the validation of Indias tolerant, civic credentials is not clear, since nearly 150 million
Muslims live in India outside IJK, and their status and treatment
could equally serve to validate those credentials (or otherwise).
Pakistan was conceived as a homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent, and from its inception Pakistani nationalism has been
rmly based on the notion that Pakistan is territorially and ideologically incomplete without Kashmir. Once again, the premise
itself is dubious: Pakistans disintegration along its main ethnoregional fault line in 1971, when eastern Pakistan became Bangladesh, exposed the limitations of the concept of an overarching
Pakistan. But the abiding power of both of these awed constructions to inuence minds and policy is a reality. One of the most

I N T R O D U C T I O N
9

important Kashmiri writer-activists of the twentieth century,

Prem Nath Bazaz, noted that the conict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir is primarily . . . an ideological war, in which
the elites of both countries have perceived foundational, nonnegotiable principles of statehood to be at stake.7 In the maximalist
versions, Kashmir is claimed to be Indias atoot ang (integral part)
and Pakistans shah rag (jugular vein). A territory that has only
one percent of India and Pakistans total population has thus been
transformed symbolically into the cornerstone of the nationhood
of both countries.
The maximalist positions of the Indian and Pakistani ideologies
are, however, only one dimension of the Kashmir problem. More
than eighty years ago, C. E. Tyndale Biscoe, a British missionary
worker who made a signicant contribution to education in Kashmir, observed: To write about the character of the Kashmiris is
not easy, as the country of Kashmir, including the province of
Jammu, is large and contains many races of people. Then again,
these various countries included under the name of Kashmir are
separated the one from the other by high mountain passes, so that
the people of these various states differ considerably the one from
the other in features, manner, customs, language, character and
religion.8
The missionary was right about the cultural and social multiplicity of J&K. The 5 million residents of the Kashmir Valley are
overwhelmingly Muslim (primarily Sunni, with a sizeable Shia minority), inheritors of a distinct regional culture built on mystic
Su traditions, and mostly Kashmiri-speaking. But the Valley is
only one of IJKs three regions, and one of ve in J&K as a whole.
To the south of the Valley in IJK lies the sprawling Jammu region, inhabited by about 4.5 million people. Jammu is topographically a formidable mix of plains, low-lying hills, and rugged moun-

10

tain ranges, and socially a mosaic of religious, ethnic, linguistic,

and caste groups. Muslims make up one-third of its population
overall, but they are a majority in the three most mountainous
of its six districts; Hindus, plus a noticeable sprinkling of Sikhs,
dominate the less mountainous and hence more populated areas.
The Valleys kind of ethnolinguistic Kashmiri community is found
only in one Jammu district and pockets of two others. Most Muslims in the Jammu region belong to other ethnic and linguistic
categories: Gujjars and Bakerwals, traditionally mountain pastoralists and herdsmen and speakers of Gojri and Pahadi (a dialect
of Punjabi), are a very sizeable component; Rajputs (high-caste
Hindu converts to Islam) are another. Jammus overall Hindu majority is also differentiated along lines of ethnicity, language, caste,
and locality. In other words, while the Jammu region as a whole is
very different from the Valley, it does not have a unitary regional
personality because of its internal heterogeneity.
Ladakh, the third IJK region, covers a huge land mass but is
thinly populated because of its harsh terrain and climatic conditions. Even here, however, there is diversityBuddhists of Tibetan ethnic stock dominate one of Ladakhs two districts, while
the other has a strong Shia Muslim majority. Across the LOC,
the Pakistani-controlled AJK districts are predominantly Punjabispeaking and very different in sociocultural terms from the Valley.
It is very important to appreciate that J&Ks social heterogeneity
is reected in a high degree of political fragmentation and complexity. The most basic political cleavage in J&K is constituted not
by party loyalties but by much more fundamental fault lines
conicting national identities and state allegiances. In IJK, three
orientations of this type exist: (1) Kashmiri proto-national identity,
pro-independence for Kashmir; (2) Indian national identity, pro-India; and (3) Pakistani national identity, pro-Pakistan. The rst and

I N T R O D U C T I O N
11

third orientations are also present across the LOC in AJK. In the
rst, the legitimate sovereign unit is Jammu and Kashmir, separate
from both India and Pakistan. In the second, India, including J&K,
is the legitimate sovereign unit. For adherents of the third orientation, the legitimate sovereign unit is Pakistan, including J&K. The
sovereignty dispute that is central to the international, India-Pakistan conict over Kashmir is thus mirrored within the society and
political space of the contested territory.
In short, there are three political segments in J&K professing rival notions of national self-determination. It has been pointed out
that such conicting preferences regarding the legitimate boundaries of sovereignty, governance, and citizenship tend to generate
the most intractable and bitter political conicts. The political
scientist Robert Dahl has noted that we cannot solve the question of the proper domain of sovereignty from within the framework of liberal democracy, since any democratic process, such as
competitive elections, presumes the rightfulness of the unit,
which is precisely the crux of disagreement in cases such as Kashmir. Dahl has observed that a crisp, unimpeachable solution to
this conundrum would be a marvellous achievement of democratic theory and practice . . . [but] alas, no altogether satisfactory
solution seems to exist.9
It is possible to make some plausible predictions regarding the
relationship between social elements of identity and political preference. For example, it is probable that the non-Muslim minoritiesHindus, Sikhs, and Buddhistswho total about 35 percent
of IJKs population adhere nearly unanimously to an Indian national identity and wish to live under Indian sovereignty, a preference overriding the social diversity and lower-order political conicts within these groups. In the Kashmir Valley, historically
a stronghold of Kashmiri regional patriotism and aspirations to

12

political self-rule, the pro-independence segment is very far ahead

of its two competitors, but even in the Valley, committed support
to Pakistan and India, in that order, exists among much smaller
segments. The Jammu region predictably presents a more ambiguous picture, and the relative strengths of the segments are likely
to vary signicantly in different parts of this diverse region.
Nor is there any clear-cut link between social alignments/cleavages and political alignments/cleavages. The small Hindu minority indigenous to the Kashmir Valley, known as Kashmiri Pandits,
share a history, a locality, and a culture with the Muslim majority
of the Valley, but are resolutely loyal to India and hostile to the
dominant pro-independence sentiment. In AJK, pro-independence
sentiments are especially prevalent in and around a southern town
called Mirpur, which is geographically and culturally distant from
the Valley but adjacent and culturally similar to contiguous areas
of Pakistani Punjab. The internal social and political context of
IJK, and of J&K as a whole, thus resembles the Russian matryoshka
dolllayers of complexity which render easy solutions such as
plebiscite or partition impracticable if not dangerous, and which
call for a more sophisticated approach.10
My third key point in this book is that the conguration of
the Kashmir problema sovereignty dispute between two states
over a territory whose population is itself fractured in its political
preferencesis not unique. In fact, cases with similar congurations and circumstances exist in our contemporary world. There
is much to be learned from comparing Kashmir with such cases,
both to illuminate the obstacles to constructive statecraft inherent
in conicts dened by interlocking, mutually reinforcing internal and international disagreements over the legitimate unit of
sovereignty and the meaning of self-determination, and to identify pathways to peace in such contexts. An observer of the con-

I N T R O D U C T I O N
13

ict in and over Cyprus has commented: The political stance of

both sides has been one of mutual self-justication and mutual
grievance, repeating incompatible narratives of wrongs and tragedies with scripts learned in the 1960s and 1970s . . . while the world
has moved on.11 This description could easily apply to the Kashmir conict, except that the scripts were learned even earlier, in
the 1940s and 1950s.
In Chapters 4 and 5 I compare Kashmir with the cases of Bosnia
and Herzegovina and, especially, Northern Ireland. This comparative approach helps identify critical shortcomings of prescriptions
frequently advanced for the Kashmir conict, such as plebiscite/
referendum on the one hand and partition on the other. It also
helps me build a case for working toward a (tacitly) multinational
political settlement in Jammu and Kashmir, a settlement that
recognizes the reality of multiple national identities (and quasinational identities, such as Kashmiri-independentist) within that
territory while respecting the core concerns of the Indian and Pakistani states and their elites regarding sovereignty and territorial
integrity. Zero-sum conicts over sovereignty and self-determination are very difcult challenges for those who seek democratic
political solutions, but they are not fated to remain utterly intractable. In this book I propose a multidimensional framework for
peace, to cope with a problem dened by multiple but intersecting sources of conict. Such a framework, I argue, is the only viable strategy for converting a stalemated zero-sum conict into a
positive-sum scenario for all sides.

ORIGINS OF THE CONFLICT

It is an irony of history that by a combination of fortuitous

circumstances a tiny nation of Kashmiris has been placed in
a position of great importance, where it can be instrumental in making or marring the future of so many.
p re m n a t h b a z a z,
Kashmiri writer and political activist, 1967

In 1947 jammu and kashmir was among the largest of 562 so-called princely states in the Indian subcontinent.
These were nominally self-governing units, ranging in size from
tiny principalities to sprawling efs, ruled by Hindu, Muslim, and
Sikh feudal potentates with pretensions to royal status. Collectively, the princely states covered 45 percent of the land mass of
the subcontinent. These vassal statelets constituted a major pillar
of the British concept of indirect rule in India. Their rulers, a
colorful assortment of maharajas and nawabs, were permitted to
administer their holdings as personal and dynastic efdoms in exchange for acknowledging the paramountcy of British power,

O R I G I N S

O F

T H E

C O N F L I C T

15

while the British directly controlled and administered the rest of

the subcontinent. Typically, British overseers known as residents
were stationed in the capitals of the larger princely states, but by
and large the Indian rulers were left to their own devices.1
The ruling family of Jammu and Kashmir were ethnic Dogras,
upper-caste Hindus from the Jammu region. The founder of the
lineage was a man called Gulab Singh, one of many local princes
in the court of Ranjit Singh, a Sikh warrior who established a
mini-empire in northern and northwestern India in the early nineteenth century with its capital in the Punjab city of Lahore (in Pakistan post-1947). After Ranjit Singhs death in 1839, Gulab Singh
began to collude with British schemes to undermine and eventually eliminate Sikh power. During the 1820s and 1830s Gulab Singh
gradually expanded his own dominion from his base in the southern reaches of the Jammu region, rst over mountainous areas in
the Jammu interior and then over the even more remote Himalayan regions of Ladakh and Baltistan. The ascendancy of the new
dynasty was consolidated with Gulab Singhs acquisition of the
Valley of Kashmir from British control in 1846, under a BritishDogra pact signed in the Punjab city of Amritsar (in India post1947). The Treaty of Amritsar stipulated that the British Government transfers and makes over, for ever, in independent possession, to Maharaja Gulab Singh and the heirs male of his body the
Kashmir Valley as well as the area of Gilgit to the north. In return,
the Dogra king agreed to pay a substantial sum of money and to
lend his military forces to the British when required. He also acknowledged the supremacy of the British Government and undertook, in token of such supremacy, to present annually to the
British Government one horse, twelve perfect shawl goats of approved breed (six male and six female), and three pairs of Kashmir
shawls.2
The princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, a sprawling, poly-

16

glot entity of diverse regions and peoples, was born through this
agreement. The eternal jurisdiction promised to the Dogra elite
in the Treaty of Amritsar lasted exactly a century, until the moment of decolonization and partition in 1947. In that year Gulab
Singhs last heir, Maharaja Hari Singh, presided over a territory
where the state subjects were, according to the British census of
1941, 77 percent Muslim, 20 percent Hindu, and 3 percent other
(mostly Sikhs, with a sprinkling of Buddhists). J&K was not the
only princely state in which rulers and elites belonged to one religion and the majority of subjects to another. For example, in the
large kingdom of Hyderabad, in southern India, and in the principality of Junagadh, in western India, Muslim ruling families presided over predominantly Hindu populations. In J&K, however,
the distance between the privileged Hindu elite centered on the
ruling family and their large majority of Muslim subjects was particularly vast. In 1941 Prem Nath Bazaz, a prominent Kashmiri
Pandit journalist and political activist, reported: The poverty of
the Muslim masses is appalling. Dressed in rags and barefoot, a
Muslim peasant presents the appearance of a starving beggar . . .
Most are landless laborers, working as serfs for absentee [Hindu]
landlords . . . Almost the whole brunt of ofcial corruption is
borne by the Muslim masses . . . Rural indebtedness [to Hindu
landlords and moneylenders] is staggering.3
Practically all accounts of J&K in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries paint a grim picture of a self-absorbed, hopelessly incompetent regime and a Muslim subject population living
in medieval conditions of poverty and oppression. In 1889 a visiting British dignitary, Walter Lawrence, commented on the begar
(indentured labor) system prevalent in the Kashmir Valley, under
which Muslim serfs were forced to work without compensation
for a small Pandit landed elite and state ofcials. This feudal sys-

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tem endured well into the twentieth century. In a book published

in 1924, a Pandit writer, Gawasha Lal Kaul, painted a Dickensian
picture of the city of Srinagar in the early 1920s. Prostitution,
theft, begging, and disease were apparently rife. C. E. Tyndale
Biscoes narrative of life in the Kashmir Valley in the early twentieth century is full of anecdotes about Muslim peasants living in
virtual enslavement in the scenic countryside, and about the Muslim neighborhoods of Srinagara city situated in a beautiful natural setting of lakes and mountainsas lthy, fetid places populated by illiterate people with no conception of rights. It is quite
possible, Tyndale Biscoe wrote sympathetically,
that if we Britishers had to undergo what the Kashmiris
have suffered, we might also have lost our manhood.
But thank God, it has been otherwise with us and other
Western nations, for to us instead has been given the
opportunity of helping some of the weaker peoples of
the world, the Kashmiri among them. May we ever be
true to our trust. Gradually are the Kashmiris rising
from slavery to manhood. Though the growth is naturally very slow at present, they are on the upward road.
I trust that they will become once more a brave people,
as they were in the days of old when their own kings
led them into battle.4

Muslims were generally not permitted to become ofcers in the

states military, which was led by Sikhs and Hindu martial castes
such as Dogras and Rajputs, and were virtually unrepresented in
the states civil administration. Until 1924 there was not a single
newspaper printed or published in the State of Jammu and Kashmir.5 Apart from the mass illiteracy due to a paucity of even primary education for Muslims, the maharajas government regarded

18

any semblance of a free press and public opinion as subversive,

and regularly tried to prevent newspapers and journals published
in Lahore by migr Kashmiris from reaching the kingdom. Underscoring the Hindu character of the state, until 1920 a death sentence was mandatory for any subject who slaughtered a cow; this
was generously reduced to ten years in prison after 1920 and subsequently to seven years.
Until the end of the 1920s, the absence of popular protest
against this state of affairs was typically attributed to what the
British scholar Alastair Lamb described as the exceptionally docile nature of the peasantry in the Vale6a view consistent with
Tyndale Biscoes theory of a people whose manhood had been
crushed by exploitation. In the 1930s, however, the era of popular
politics in Kashmir arrived. Kashmir migrs living in the Punjab
had established a forum called the All-India Kashmir Muslim Conference, based in Lahore, which started to offer scholarship grants
to enable talented young Muslims from J&K to acquire university
education in India proper. The nucleus of a new generation of political leaders emerged through this scheme, usually after training
at the Aligarh Muslim University, a celebrated institution of learning in northern India. This generation of pioneer activists was
headed by a schoolteacher called Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah,
born in 1905 in Soura, then a village near Srinagar and now a suburb of the city. In 1930 Abdullah and a few friends established a
Reading Room Association in Srinagar to discuss questions of social and political change, while a similar group, the Young Mens
Muslim Association, was formed in the southern city of Jammu.
(Srinagar and Jammu are J&Ks two capital cities: by long-established tradition, the states administration is based in Srinagar during the summer months and in Jammu during the winter.) In July
1931 an attempt by young Muslims to organize a deputation to

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present a list of grievances to the maharaja ended in a riot on the

streets of downtown Srinagar; twenty-one persons were killed
when the maharajas police opened re on protesters.
This event marked a turning point in the history of political
mobilization in Kashmir. In the words of the Kashmiri historian
Mohammad Ishaq Khan: 13 July 1931 was a historic day in the
annals of Srinagar. The dumb-driven cattle raised the standard
of revolt. The people were never to be cowed again by punitive
police action. Even the women joined the struggle and to them
belongs the honor of facing cavalry charges in Srinagars Maisuma
bazaar. Indeed, as the human rights activist Rita Manchanda
writes, Maisuma, then as now a rough lower middle-class warren
of a neighborhood in the heart of Srinagar, emerged as the center of support for Sheikh Abdullahs campaign to free Jammu and
Kashmir from Dogra rule, and Maisuma women were in the
forefront of demonstrations. (Almost six decades later, in 1989
1990, the winding lanes of Maisuma would once again be a
stronghold of political agitation, as hundreds of women demonstrated their solidarity with the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation
Fronts armed campaign to free J&K from Indian rule.)7
The events of 13 July, which have since achieved near-mythological status in Kashmirs political folklore, had an impact on the regime as well as in the sphere of grassroots politics. In November
1931 the maharajas government agreed to the formation of a
commission headed by B. J. Glancy, an ofcial of the foreign and
political department of the British government of India, to inquire into the causes of unrest and propose a strategy of reforms.
The Glancy commission did suggest, in April 1932, a series of reforms to the administrative structure and the systems of education, land tenure, and taxation in order to make life somewhat
more bearable for the Muslim masses and provide opportunities

20

to the small but increasingly vocal stratum of educated, angry

young men who were advancing demands on their behalf. The
commission also urged that minimal freedoms of the press and
public expression should be tolerated. Some limited, halting action on the Glancy proposals was undertaken in the following
years. But through the 1930s and 1940s it became increasingly clear
that the autocratic regime could not be reformed to the extent
demanded by an increasingly mobilized, politically conscious population.
J&Ks rst political party, the AllJammu and Kashmir Muslim
Conference (MC), was founded in October 1932 to direct the nascent but growing movement for social and political change. Its
principal leaders were Sheikh Abdullah from the Valley and
Chaudhary Ghulam Abbas from the Jammu region. In 1938 the
MC published a manifesto entitled National Demand, calling for
the implementation of substantive reforms to bring about a Responsible Government in the state, albeit under the aegis of the
Maharaja. The token concession to the maharaja proved insufcient to avert mass arrests of the party leaders . . . and a policy
of total repression by the Government.8 In 1938 the MC, after
considerable internal debate, decided to redene the basis of its
politics. Primarily at the behest of the Abdullah group, which included a handful of progressive Pandits and Sikhs, the party declared its intent to end communalism by ceasing to think in
terms of Muslims and non-Muslims and invited all Hindus and
Sikhs who believe in the freedom of their country from the shackles of an irresponsible rule to participate in the popular struggle.9
At the partys annual convention in 1939, the MC was accordingly renamed the AllJammu and Kashmir National Conference
(NC). Of the 176 delegates present, 173 voted to ratify the change,
although some Muslim members expressed misgivings that a

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secular organization would gravitate towards the Indian National

Congress, the party leading Indias independence movement, and
that the Hindu-Sikh element in the party would undermine the
movement because of their vested interests in Dogra rule. These
fears, voiced in 1939 mainly by Ghulam Abbas and his followers
but initially, in 1938, also by some of Abdullahs close colleagues,
were allayed by an off-the-record understanding that the movement would steer clear of both the Congress and the All-India
Muslim League,10 the party that passed the Pakistan Resolution
a year later in 1940 and then led a campaign culminating in the
creation of Pakistan in 1947. The religious and social conservatives
in the NC fold were, however, rapidly alienated from the reoriented party by a combination of factors, including personal and
factional conict, ideological disagreement, and interregional differences. The predominantly Valley-based group led by the charismatic Abdullah was, in the perception of Abbas and his largely
Jammu-based faction, developing unacceptable leftist and socially
radical tendencies and moving steadily closer to left-wing nationalists in the Congress, thus violating the off-the-record agreement.
Abbass loyalists in Jammu districts, together with a small antiAbdullah faction in the Valley, split from the NC in 1941 and revived the Muslim Conference. From then on, the NC would be
identied with the personality and politics of Sheikh Abdullah,
who came to be known as the Sher--Kashmir (Lion of Kashmir).
The reservations of Abdullahs critics were not baseless. In 1940
Abdullah invited Jawaharlal Nehru, then a top Congress leader
and subsequently independent Indias prime minister from 1947
until his death in 1964, to visit the Kashmir Valley. Among Congress leaders, Nehru, a man of sternly anti-feudal, anti-monarchist
convictions, took a special interest in Kashmir because his family
were Kashmiri Pandits who had migrated from the Valley to the

22

plains of north India. The visit was a great success and marked
the beginning of a tortured personal and political relationship
between Nehru and Abdullah. In August 1942, at the height of
World War II, the Congress launched a direct-action movement
calling on the British to Quit India. The movement, which
spread like wildre across non-princely India and assumed the
form of armed resistance to British authority in some parts of the
country, was put down by means of mass arrests of Congress organizers and brutal violence against rank-and-le Congress activists. The Muslim League, the colonial governments collaborator
at the time, condemned the Quit India movement as not directed
for securing the independence of all constituent elements in the
life of the country, but to establish Hindu raj [rule] and deal a
death-blow to the Muslim goal of Pakistan, and the J&K Muslim
Conferences stance was similar. The NC, however, passed a resolution sharply condemning the repression unleashed by the British government in India proper.11
In 1944 it was the turn of the Muslim Leagues leader, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, to visit Kashmir. Although the NC and the MC
competed with each other to organize a grand welcome for him,
Jinnah chose to address the annual gathering of the MC and certied the MC as the representative organization of 99 percent of
J&K Muslims. After this rebuff, Abdullah had no alternative but
to cultivate closer links with the Congress leadership, particularly
Nehru. In 1945 the NCs annual gathering was attended not only
by Nehru but by two other Congress leaders, Maulana Abul Kalam
Azad and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the latter known as Frontier
Gandhi because of the inuence of his pacist movement in the
North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), which borders both J&K
and Afghanistan. In 1946, as the NCs campaign against the autocracy entered a climactic phase and was met with severe repression

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by the regime, Nehru entered J&K in a show of solidarity with

the NCs struggle and was promptly arrested by the authorities.
Despite these personal links and a certain ideological afnity
socially leftist republicanismwith a section of the Congress, the
J&K National Conference was not reduced to a satellite or surrogate of Indias Congress movement. Maintaining an entirely separate and independent organizational existence, the NC during the
1940s gradually acquired the dimensions of a mass movement, especially in its center of activity, the Kashmir Valley. Writing a tumultuous decade later, Josef Korbel, the Czech chairman of the
United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP), recorded the mass support the NC and Sheikh Abdullah himself enjoyed across most of what had by then become Indian-controlled
Jammu and Kashmir (IJK)separated from Azad (Free) Jammu
and Kashmir (AJK) and erstwhile Muslim Conference strongholds
by the ceasere linealthough he noted a distinct dilution of support for the NC beyond the Kashmir Valley.12 The movements
growing strength owed much to the popularity of Abdullah, then
already on the way to becoming a legend in Kashmir, but even
more to the remarkable organizational abilities of his talented
young lieutenantsMirza Afzal Beg, G. M. Sadiq, Bakshi Ghulam
Mohammed, Ghulam Mohiuddin Karra, and Syed Mir Qasim,
among others.
Two very important core characteristics distinguished the NC
in this mobilizational phase from its Congress counterpart in India proper. First, the NCs ideology was specically directed to
the emancipation of J&K from the post-1846 dispensation, and
was based ideologically on a deep sense of regional patriotism,
centered on the Kashmir Valley. In this conception, Kashmir and
India were fraternal but ultimately separate entities, whose relations ought to be governed by equality and mutual respect. Sec-

24

ond, despite its declared secularism, embodied in the 1939 decision

to include non-Muslims, the NC movement never abandoned its
Kashmiri Muslim heritage.
To some extent the NCs Muslim orientation was inevitable
the movement was directed against a corrupt, repressive, and
Hindu ruling hierarchy, J&Ks population had a Muslim majority of 77 percent, and the Kashmir Valley was even more overwhelmingly Muslim. But the movements inclusive, left-leaning,
yet decisively Muslim character was not simply an effect of religious demography or the nature of the 18461947 regime. The
NCs ideology and mobilization strategies were, from its inception and during the dynamic 1940s, steeped in a distinctly Muslim
ethos, shaped above all by the Valleys history, culture, and traditions. Sheikh Abdullahs popularity with the masses owed much
to the fact that he excelled in reciting beautifully from the Quran.
His power base in the Valley was rooted in his and his associates
control of most of its mosques, acquired at the expense of religious preachers of the more traditional variety. During the cataclysmic events of 1946 and 1947, he established his political and
militia headquarters on the premises of Hazratbal, a beautiful,
gleaming white shrine on the shores of the Nageen Lake on the
outskirts of Srinagar, where a hair of the Prophet Mohammad is
preserved as a relic.13 The general secretary of the NC and editor
of the partys paper Khidmat was a prominent cleric, Maulana Mohammed Sayyid Masoodi, highly respected by the people for the
depth of his views and the sobriety of his judgment.14
In the years leading up to 1947 the National Conference proved
to be a remarkably dynamic agent of political mobilization. The
partys dening traitsthe charismatic leader, the solid organizational network of talented and committed young men, the asser-

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tion of a proud regional patriotism rooted in a shared Muslim

identity, and the promise of progressive social changewere a
beacon of hope for an impoverished, politically disenfranchised
population. Meeting in the northern Valley town of Sopore in
September 1944, party delegates adopted a manifesto entitled
Naya Kashmir (New Kashmir), an ambitious program for J&Ks
future under a democratic regime.
The Naya Kashmir manifesto is the most important political
document in modern Kashmirs history. It has three sections. The
rst lays out the partys conception of the states future constitutional framework. At the apex, it visualizes a representative
legislature called the National Assembly and a cabinet government, and it calls for decentralized governance based on devolution of decisionmaking and administrative responsibilities to districts, tehsils (subdivisions of districts), towns, and villages. The
monarch is reduced to a titular, gurehead role. Recognizing the
multilingual character of J&KKashmiri being the dominant
tongue only in the Valley and a few areas in Jammu, while Dogri is
dominant only in the Jammu plainsthe manifesto designates
Urdu as the ofcial lingua franca. Kashmiri, Dogri, Punjabi, Hindi,
Balti, and Dardi are all given the status of national languages.
The second section, on the economy, is heavily socialist in tone
communist sympathizers such as G. M. Sadiq, the partys main
ideologue, were prominent in the NC leadership at the time.15
There is a heavy rhetorical emphasis on state-led, planned industrialization. The more signicant content of this section, given
the reality of a predominantly peasant society, relates to the agrarian economy. The manifesto called for the abolition of parasitic
landlordism without compensation, transfer of land to the tillers,
and establishment of cooperative associations. The nal section

26

elaborates social and educational schemes for various downtrodden sections of Kashmirs population, including a charter of
rights for women.16
Almost six decades later, Naya Kashmir is a very distant
memory for people in Kashmir. In June 2002 a third-generation
Abdullah, the sheikhs grandson Omar, formally took over as president of the NCa party that retains the name but is in every
other sense a debased, skeletal version of the historic National
Conferencefrom his father, the sheikhs elder son, Farooq
Abdullah. The ceremony was held in Srinagar, amid tight security
and orchestrated sycophancy of the Abdullah family, including
ritual invocations of the unnished Naya Kashmir agenda, by a
few thousand men . . . escorted to the venue in typical rent-acrowd fashion. A sixty-ve-year-old veteran NC worker noted the
contrast with the era when the NC was truly a popular movement. In those days, he recalled, the Sher--Kashmirs National
Conference and Kashmir were synonymous. Today I had to ght
with my son, who is vehemently against my participation in this
program. Kashmir has changed and so have its people.17 (On this
transformation see Chapters 2 and 3.)
Two elements of the Naya Kashmir manifesto deserve to be
highlighted, since both were central to the politics of Kashmir after 1947. First, the manifesto was clearly based on a Jacobin conception of popular sovereignty, augmented by a generous dollop
of Bolshevismideas inspired by the Soviet modelin the socioeconomic parts of the program. In April 1946, launching the Quit
Kashmir movement, an all-out mass agitation against the regime,
Abdullah declared: The time has come to tear up the Treaty of
Amritsar . . . Sovereignty is not the birthright of Maharaja Hari
Singh. Quit Kashmir is not a question of revolt. It is a matter of

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right.18 This conception of popular sovereignty is perfectly understandable in the context of struggle against a narrowly based, autocratic system which systematically denied the most basic rights
and representation to the vast majority of people. It is also democratic in that it reects a genuine, broadly based popular movement for a more inclusive and responsive system of government.
However, like the ideology of the original Jacobins of revolutionary France and that of many other twentieth-century third
world movements inspired or inuenced by the Jacobin model,
this sort of conception tends to be in tension with liberal-democratic norms of political pluralism, accountability of those in
power, and tolerance of dissent and opposition. The deeply authoritarian streak in the NCs emancipation movement rapidly became evident after 1947 and made its own contribution to the subversion and retardation of democratic development in Kashmir.
Nonetheless, for the peasant masses in IJK after 1947, the arrogance and authoritarianism of the new ruling elitethe revolutionaries of the NC-led movementwere compensated for by the
rapid fulllment of a key point of the Naya Kashmir program.
On 13 July 1950 the Kashmir Government, with Sheikh Abdullah
at its helm, introduced the most sweeping land reform in the entire subcontinent. Prior to this, almost all of Jammu and Kashmirs arable area of 2.2 million acres had been owned by 396 big
landlords and 2,347 intermediate landlords, who rented to peasants under medieval conditions of exploitation.19 Between 1950
and 1952, 700,000 landless peasants, mostly Muslims in the Valley
but including 250,000 lower-caste Hindus in the Jammu region, became peasant-proprietors as over a million acres were directly
transferred to them, while another sizeable chunk of land passed
to government-run collective farms. By the early 1960s, 2.8 million

28

acres of farmland (rice being the principal crop in the Valley)

and fruit orchards were under cultivation, worked by 2.8 million
smallholding peasant-proprietor households.
Visiting J&K in the mid-1950s, Daniel Thorner, an agrarian historian and economist, found that despite some defects in implementation, many tillers have become landowners and some land
has even gone to the landless. The peasantry of the Valley were
not long ago fearful and submissive. No one who has spent time
with Kashmiri villagers will say the same today. Another expert,
Wolf Ladjensky, observed that whereas virtually all land reforms
in India lay stress on elimination of the zamindari [large estates]
system with compensation, or rent reduction and security of tenure [for tillers], the Kashmir reforms call for distribution of land
among tenants without compensation to the erstwhile proprietors
. . . [and] whereas land reform enforcement in most of India is not
so effective, in Kashmir enforcement is unmistakably rigorous.20
The transformation of rural Kashmir had far-reaching political consequences. Hundreds of thousands of newly empowered
peasant families would henceforth regard Sheikh Mohammad
Abdullah, seen as the principal agent of this transformation, as a
messiah. The NCs ag, depicting a plow, the farmers key implement, set in yellow against a red background, aptly reected this
bedrock support among masses of emancipated serfs. However,
in parts of the Jammu region the imposition of land reform catalyzed a tenacious movement of social and political reaction,
which persists to this day. The majority of landlords and moneylenders were Hindus, and the axe naturally fell on them.21 The
Hindu population was numerically dominant in large tracts of
southern and southeastern Jammu, especially after the expulsion
and ight of large numbers of Muslims from this area to AJK and

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Pakistan amid large-scale communal (sectarian religious) violence

in late 1947. Dispossessed landlords and former ofcials in the
Dogra administration regrouped after 1947 principally in this area,
and began to vent their class and communal grievances in the
form of regionalist opposition to the political supremacy of the
new elite of Valley-based Muslims.
The Quit Kashmir movement of MayJune 1946 was a landmark in the history of political mobilization in Kashmir. The Muslim Conference leader, Ghulam Abbas, speaking in Lahore, condemned the movement as an agitation started at the behest of
Hindu leaders, in a tone and phrase strikingly reminiscent of the
Muslim Leagues denunciation of Congresss Quit India agitation
in 1942. But mass protests spread in response to the NCs call for a
revolutionary overthrow of the regime, particularly in the partys
Valley strongholds, and were contained after several weeks only
by means of mass arrests of leaders, including Abdullah, and brutal police action against the rank and le. The agitation wilted under intense repression, but the Dogra military excesses in the Valley caused tremendous commotion, leaving bitter memories of
cruelties rmly implanted in the minds of the normally peaceful
Kashmiris.22 In late 1946 the Muslim Conference, in a strategy
strikingly similar to that used by the Muslim League in India
proper after the Congresss Quit India movement was crushed, attempted to exploit the political vacuum in the Valley caused by
the incarceration of many NC leaders and the ight of those who
had managed to evade detention. This attempt backred. After
Jammu-based MC leaders made speeches critical of the regime in
front of a Friday prayer congregation at Srinagars Jama Masjid
(Big Mosque), they were arrested and detained indenitely. As the
momentous year 1947 dawned on the subcontinent, members of

30

J&Ks political class were either imprisoned or in hiding, the regime was enjoying its temporary upper hand, and the population
was sullenly recuperating from the repression of 1946.

Two independent Dominions, India and Pakistan, were born on

1415 August 1947. The princely states were a peculiar issue in the
decolonization process. With the lapse of British paramountcy
over them, they were technically free to accede to either Dominion, or to become independent states. Addressing a large gathering of princes and their representatives in Delhi in late July 1947,
however, Lord Mountbatten, the last British administrator of India, was unequivocal that the third was merely a theoretical option. He urged them to make a decision to accede to one or the
other Dominion, before 15 August if possible, after evaluating two
criteria: geographical embeddedness in or contiguity to India or
Pakistan, and the wishes of their population of subjects.
Under these criteria, the accession of the vast majority of
princely states to India was a certainty. Only a handful of stateletssuch as Bahawalpur, a large principality in southern
Punjablay within the borders of Pakistan. A sizeable minority
of units within India had Muslim rulers, but their future was
sealed by territorial location as well as by the fact of a majority
of Hindu subjects. Only two of these states, Junagadh (80 percent Hindu) and Hyderabad (87 percent Hindu) would pose any
problem at all, because of the recalcitrance of their rulers. In
Junagadh, in western India, the ruler acceded to and then ed
to Pakistan. In Hyderabad, southern India, the ruler stalled on a
decision for a year, until the Indian army invaded in September
1948 and settled the matter. Nonetheless, Congress leaders were
deeply concerned to ensure rapid and orderly integration of the

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princely states into the Indian Union. In early July 1947 the Congress set up a special department, headed by independent Indias
rst interior minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, a Gujarati Congress leader known for his right-wing pro-Hindu leanings, to organize and supervise the transition.
For the Pakistanis, far less was at stake. Thus Mohammed Ali
Jinnah, by profession a constitutional lawyer, adopted the tactical
stance that the princely states would become autonomous and
sovereign states on the termination of paramountcy and free to
choose any of the three options before them (the phrase autonomous and sovereign was identical to the wording of the Pakistan
Resolution of 1940, which called for the creation of autonomous
and sovereign states in Muslim-majority regions of northwestern
and eastern India once the British withdrew).
The choice was straightforward for practically all princely
statesexcept Jammu and Kashmir. J&K was territorially contiguous to both India and Pakistan, although its contiguity to two Pakistani provinces, (western) Punjab and the NWFP, was far more
pronounced than its territorial link to Indian eastern Punjab. The
princely state also had close trade, transport, and commercial
links with contiguous areas of western Punjab and the NWFP,
and many migrs of Kashmiri origin were settled in west Punjab.
The population of J&K was 77 percent Muslim, reinforcing the
case for accession to Pakistan. However, this case was complicated
by two factors specic to J&K. The rst was the predominance of
the NC, a Kashmiri regionalist movement with ties to left-wing,
republican elements in the Indian National Congress, in the Kashmir Valley and Kashmiri-speaking Muslim enclaves in the Jammu
region. The Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists who made up 23 percent of J&Ks population were almost certain to favor India, and
the Muslim Conferences following in the Jammu region, Pakistan.

32

But the NCs mass base remained an indeterminate factor, albeit

potentially tilted toward India because of its leaders ideological
afnities and personal relationships. The second factor was the
unique situation of a Hindu autocrat who ruled a Muslim-majority population, but who nonetheless was the legal authority to decide the issue of accession.
The lull in Kashmir was broken in the spring of 1947, when
an uprising against the maharaja broke out in Poonch, an area
in northwestern Jammu sandwiched between the Kashmir Valley to the east and Rawalpindi division of northwestern Punjab
to the west. Poonch had been an autonomous principality within
the state of J&K, and ruled by its own raja, until World War
II, when the local ruler was deposed by the Dogra kingship. The
maharajas administration then started levying punitive taxes
on Poonchs Muslim peasantry. The local revolt began in protest against this taxation policy, and the regimes Sikh and Dogra
troops reacted with severe reprisals against the population. This
was a grave error. Poonch, along with neighboring west Punjab
and NWFP districts, was a prime recruiting ground for soldiers
of imperial Britains Indian army. Indeed, of a total of 71,667 men
from J&K who had served in British forces during World War
II, 60,402 were Poonchi Muslims.23 The area was thus full of recently demobilized soldiers, who responded to the reprisals by
evacuating their families to west Punjab areas beyond the boundaries of the princely state, then returning to confront the regimes
forces. The revolt was renewed in the aftermath of partition in
August, this time with a denite pro-Pakistan character. By early
October the rebels had gained control of almost the entire
Poonch district except the town of Poonch, garrisoned by a government force. Flush with success in the Poonch ghting, the proPakistan chieftains of western Jammu districtsMuzaffarabad,

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Poonch, Mirpurproclaimed the formation of a provisional

Azad Jammu and Kashmir government in Rawalpindi, Pakistan,
on 3 October 1947.
On 15 August 1947, meanwhile, the maharajas regime had concluded a so-called standstill agreementnormally the precursor
to accessionwith the government of Pakistan. Under this agreement, the Pakistani government assumed charge of J&Ks post
and telegraph system and undertook to supply the state with
foodstuffs and other essential commodities. This strange entente
between a ruler and regime with manifestly anti-Muslim policies
and the new Muslim state in the subcontinent was the result of
compulsions and calculations on both sides. The Pakistanis knew
that geographical contiguity and religious demography favored
J&Ks accession to Pakistan. However, the maharaja was still the
authority empowered to sign a legally binding accession, and they
decided to court his cooperation. The maharajas overriding priority was maintaining his throne and privileges, and he and his advisers thought it was worth negotiating with the Muslim Leagues
Pakistan on this, given Congresss well-known aversion to the feudal, autocratic nature of princely rule and the Congress connections of J&Ks largest organized political movement, the NC.
The Poonch uprising upset this delicate irtation. To make matters worse, Punjab and the NWFP were convulsed with violence
in AugustSeptember 1947, communal massacres were taking
place amid a collapse of civil order and traditional neighborly relations, and armed brigandage was rife. In early September armed
groups from Pakistan began inltrating J&K from west Punjab,
especially the Rawalpindi zone, looting and attacking Hindu
and Sikh minorities. By early October the J&K government complained to Pakistans foreign ministry that cross-border attacks
were being conducted across several hundred kilometers of the

34

Jammu border, from Rawalpindi in the north to Sialkot in the

south. In language that was to be echoed by Indian protests
against Pakistan-sponsored cross-border terrorism in Kashmir
several decades later, the J&K government demanded that Pakistani authorities put a stop to the inltrations if intergovernmental dialogue was to continue. The government of Pakistan, again
in language reminiscent of Pakistans typical response to Indias
accusations decades later, denied that the inltrations were systematic and called attention to terror and atrocities perpetrated
by J&K forces against the Muslim population of Poonchatrocities which, it suggested, were provoking spontaneous reactions
both within J&K and from ethnic and religious kin across the
border.
In the rst half of October the relationship between the two
governments disintegrated. On 3 October, the day the Azad
Kashmir government was proclaimed in Rawalpindi, the J&K government cabled Pakistans foreign ministry in Karachi, charging Pakistan with violation of its obligations under the standstill
agreement and with complicity in cross-border raids. On 18 October an even more acrimonious cable on the same lines, alleging attempted economic strangulation as a pressure tactic, was sent to
Pakistans prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, and its governor-general, M. A. Jinnah, signaling a breakdown of relations. In response,
Pakistani ofcials called for talks to relieve cross-border tensions
and noted with disapproval the J&K governments decision to release Sheikh Abdullah on 29 September 1947 while continuing the
incarceration of leading pro-Pakistan gures. Emerging from sixteen months of imprisonment, Abdullah delivered a typically populist speech at a huge public meeting at Hazratbal on 5 October, in
which he declared the accession issue to be secondary to the establishment of a popular government.

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Pakistans diplomatic strategy in Kashmir had clearly unraveled

by mid-October, and its economic blockade of J&K had backred.
On 21 October the climactic episode in the unfolding drama began. On that day several thousand Pashtun tribesmen, known
then as now for their impressive if unruly warrior tradition, began
an offensive into J&K from the sprawling Hazara district of the
NWFP, located north and northwest of the princely state. The
fact that these tribal areas largely lay (then as now) beyond the
writ of established government enabled Pakistans prime minister
to claim on 4 November that Indian attempts to portray the rebellion of an enslaved people against the maharajas illegal and
immoral regime as an invasion from outside, just because some
outsiders have shown active sympathy with it, amounted to a
dishonest rewriting of history.24
The incursion showed clear signs of organization and planning,
however. Although many of the raiders were motivated by the
prospect of loot and rape, they were led by experienced military
leaders familiar with the terrain and equipped with modern arms,
[and] they poured down in numbers estimated at 5,000-strong
initially, with a eet of transport vehicles numbering about 300
trucks.25 It soon became clear that the attack had precise strategic
aims. After taking the town of Muzaffarabad (later the capital of
AJK) on the Pakistan-J&K border, the raiders headed straight for
the heart of the Kashmir Valley. Meeting almost no resistance
from the maharajas crumbling forces as they advanced into the
northern part of the Valley, they rapidly captured the town of
Baramulla, just twenty miles northwest of Srinagar. On 24 October the maharajas administration sent an urgent request to New
Delhi for military assistance to repulse the raiders.
After a quick assessment of the crisis, the top Indian leaders
were more than willing to oblige. However, Nehru, Patel, and

36

others were advised by Mountbatten, governor-general of the Indian Dominion, not to send in troops without rst securing the
accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India, since military intervention prior to accession would in legal terms be an Indian invasion of a neutral territory. Accordingly, the beleaguered maharaja
signed the formal Instrument of Accession to Indiaceding to
the federal government, as per normal practice, jurisdiction over
defense, foreign affairs, and communicationsand handed it over
to an emissary of the Indian government in Jammu city, who ew
back to Delhi with the all-important document. The following
day, 27 October, Mountbatten replied to the maharaja accepting
accession, but noted that once law and order had been restored
and the invader expelled the accession should be ratied by a
reference to the people.
Abdullah had arrived in Delhi from Srinagar on the evening
of 25 October and was there on 2627 Octoberindeed he was
staying at Prime Minister Nehrus residencereinforcing bitter
Pakistani suspicions of an Indian-Abdullah conspiracy, abetted by
Mountbatten, which had turned the tables in the struggle for
Kashmir. On 27 October Abdullah told an Indian newspaper, the
Times of India, that the tribal invasion had to be resisted because
it represented an attempt to coercively absorb Kashmir into Pakistan. Indeed, a veteran political commentator in IJK has written
that many Kashmiris were outraged by the Pakistani attempt
to rst secure accession by wooing the hated maharaja, and after
that failed, to decide the issue by force.26 On the morning of
27 October 1947, the rst Indian airborne units landed at Srinagars
airport and were warmly greeted by top NC leaders. On hearing of Indias military intervention, Jinnah immediately asked the
British general commanding the Pakistani army to deploy regular
Pakistani troops in Kashmir, only to be told by the generals coun-

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sel that since the territory was now legally and constitutionally
part of India, such a deployment would amount to a declaration
of war on India, inviting a broader India-Pakistan war.
The Indians arrived to nd that raiding units had penetrated the
outskirts of Srinagar. Much like Indian forces in the Kargil conict
of 1999, they also rapidly discovered that they were dealing with
an organized body of men armed with medium and light machine-guns and mortars, and led by commanders thoroughly conversant with modern tactics and use of ground and possessing
considerable engineering skill.27 The Indians fought a defensive,
holding operation to prevent Srinagar from being overrun in the
rst week of the operation, but subsequently they regained the
initiative, primarily because of two factors. First, some of the raiders had engaged in looting, rape, and murder against the overwhelmingly Muslim population during their advance, spoiling any
possibility of goodwill and support from the co-religionists they
had ostensibly come to liberate. The town of Baramulla, for example, had been pillaged, and brutal acts against local civilians in
general and women in particular had occurred in other north
Kashmir towns taken by the raiders, such as Handwara. Second,
the existence and cooperation of a well-honed NC organization
throughout the Valley was invaluable to the Indians. While signing the accession to India, the maharaja appointed his bte noire,
Sheikh Abdullah, to head an interim administration. In Srinagar
the NC soon emerged as the de facto government. Thousands of
volunteers enrolled in the NCs National Militia, quickly organized by the sheikhs top aides like Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed
and G. M. Sadiq, which included a womens unit.
Fortied by this formidable support on the ground, Indian
troops, reinforced by armored cars which had arrived by road via
Jammu and the Banihal Pass, rst pushed the raiders out of the vi-

38

cinity of Srinagar, eliminating a threat to the citys aireld. They

then retook Baramulla on 8 November and Uri, a town farther
west which has straddled IJKs border with AJK ever since, on 14
November. The Pakistani leadership explicitly held the NCs collaboration with the Indians responsible for this dramatic reversal
of the military situation. Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan said
in late November 1947: Sheikh Abdullah has been a paid agent
of Congress for the last two decades and with the exception of
some gangsters he has purchased with Congress money, he has
no following among the Muslim masses. It is astonishing that
Pandit Nehru should proclaim this Quisling to be the acknowledged leader of the Muslims of Kashmir. On 2 November 1947,
as ghting raged on the ground, Nehru declared his governments
pledge, given not only to the people of Kashmir but to the
world, to hold a referendum under international auspices such
as the United Nations to determine whether the people of J&K
ultimately preferred India or Pakistan. Nehru reiterated this commitment numerous times over the next few years at press conferences, public meetings, and international forums. In August 1952,
for example, he told Indias Parliament that he wanted no forced
unions, and that if the people of Jammu and Kashmir decided
to part company with us, they can go their way and we shall go
our way.28
This was also the stance of the United Nations. In January 1948,
in response to an Indian complaint about Pakistan-sponsored aggression in a territory which had acceded to India, the U.N.s Security Council established the United Nations Commission for India
and Pakistan (UNCIP) to play a mediating role in Kashmir. In
April 1948, as winter snows melted and ghting resumed on several fronts in J&K, the Security Council adopted a detailed resolution instruct[ing] the Commission to proceed at once to the In-

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dian subcontinent and there place its good ofces and mediation
at the disposal of the Governments of India and Pakistan with a
view to facilitating the necessary measures by the two Governments, both with respect to the restoration of peace and order
and the holding of a plebiscite, acting in cooperation with one another and with the Commission.
This resolution urged the government of Pakistan to use its
best endeavors to secure the withdrawal from the State of
Jammu and Kashmir of tribesmen and Pakistani nationals not
normally resident therein who have entered the State for the purpose of ghting. Once UNCIP was satised that such a withdrawal was taking place, the government of India was urged to
put into operation in consultation with the Commission a plan
for withdrawing their own forces from Jammu and Kashmir and
reducing them progressively to the minimum strength required
for the support of civil power in the maintenance of law and order. Once this was achieved, the resolution said that the Government of India should undertake that there will be established in
Jammu and Kashmir a Plebiscite Administration to hold a plebiscite as soon as possible on the question of the accession of the
State to India or Pakistan.29
In August 1948 UNCIP adopted a resolution calling on India and
Pakistan to reach a ceasere agreement in Kashmir, following
which an internationally supervised process could be set in motion whereby the future status of the State of Jammu and Kashmir shall be determined in accordance with the will of the people.30 After such a ceasere nally came into effect on 1 January
1949, UNCIP adopted another resolution on 5 January, announcing that the Secretary-General of the United Nations will, in
agreement with the Commission, nominate a Plebiscite Administrator who shall be a person of high international standing.31

40

That the plebiscite was never held is regarded by Pakistanis, and

by pro-Pakistan as well as pro-independence people in J&K, as
proof of Indian perdy. The typical Indian rejoinder is that since
Pakistani forces never vacated the areas of J&K under their control, the rst condition specied by the United Nations for holding
the plebiscite was not fullled, and the blame lies with Pakistan.
This hiatus between the efforts and prescriptions of international organizations and ofcials on the one hand, and the actual
evolution of a conict on the ground on the other, is not at all
unusual, as for example demonstrated throughout the 1990s by
the succession of wars in former Yugoslavia. On the ground in
Kashmir, prospects for any kind of negotiated settlement had
been severely undermined in late 1947, not just by the ghting in
the Kashmir Valley, but by an orgy of mass killing and expulsion
in the Jammu region between October and December. Because of
its location, after partition the Jammu region became a transit
point for huge numbers of refugees in both directionstraumatized, terrorized Hindus and Sikhs eeing to India from Pakistani
Punjab and the NWFP, and traumatized, terrorized Muslims
eeing to Pakistan from Indian Punjabboth sides with harrowing experiences of slaughter and atrocities. This destabilizing inux combined with rising tensions within the region to set off
further carnage. The entire Hindu and Sikh populations of Muslim-majority districts in western Jammu like Muzaffarabad, Bagh,
Rawalakot (western Poonch), Kotli, Mirpur, and Bhimbar were
killed or expelled. Mass murder and expulsion of Muslims occurred in Hindu-dominant eastern Jammu districtsUdhampur,
Kathua, and Jammu city and its environs.
The front lines remained static over the winter of 19471948 because of the combination of harsh weather and hilly terrain, but
hostilities resumed with a vengeance with the onset of spring. In

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AprilMay 1948 the Indian army made further gains, retaking the
strategic town of Rajouri on the Jammu front and expanding Indian-controlled territory farther north in the Valley. At this point
the regular Pakistani army entered the fray, and the ghting stalemated. The nal act of the rst India-Pakistan war over Kashmir
occurred when Pakistani forces launched a thrust toward the Valley from the mountainous areas of Gilgit and Skardu to the north.
The drive was repulsed by Indian light tanks at the Zojila Pass,
which marks the boundary between the Valley and the huge,
sparsely populated region of Ladakh, and the Indians consolidated
their position by capturing the Ladakh towns of Dras and Kargil
in November 1948, establishing in the process a strategic road
link between Srinagar and Leh, the center of Buddhist-dominated
eastern Ladakh.
The truce of January 1949 came into effect only because each
side was exhausted and convinced that it could no longer make
signicant territorial gains against the other. The ceasere line
left the Indians with the bulk of Jammu and Kashmirs territory
(139,000 of 223,000 square kilometers, approximately 63 percent)
and population. The Indians had gained the prize piece of real estate, the Kashmir Valley, and they also controlled most of the
Jammu and Ladakh regions. These areas became Indian Jammu
and Kashmir (IJK). The Pakistanis were left with a long strip of
land running on a north-south axis in western J&K, mostly
Jammu districts bordering Pakistani Punjab and the NWFP (these
districts constitute AJK), a slice of Ladakh (Skardu), and the remote mountain zones of Gilgit and Baltistan (the Northern
Areas). The Kashmir dispute had been born.
This original dividing linecalled the ceasere line (CFL) until
it was renamed the Line of Control (LOC) in 1972has changed
only marginally since the end of 1948 in subsequent military con-

42

icts between India and Pakistan, notably in December 1971. Since

this de facto border drawn in blood clearly favors India in territorial terms, India has been the status quo power in the South Asian
conict over Kashmir. As late as mid-1954, Nehru was asserting
that India still stands by her international commitments [to a
plebiscite] on Kashmir.32 However, in April 1956 the Indian leader
disclosed that in May 1955 he had asked his Pakistani counterpart to consider settling the dispute by converting the CFL into
the permanent international boundary between the two countries. The Pakistani prime minister, Mohammed Ali Bogra, conrmed that the offer had been madeand immediately rejected,
not surprisingly, given Pakistans persistent stance as the revisionist power in the dispute. Bogra added that Nehru had rst
broached the idea as early as October 1948 to Pakistans rst prime
minister, Liaquat Ali Khan.33 The reaction to Indias rigid determination to maintain the status quo has been the entrenchment of
an equally tenacious revisionism and irredentism in Pakistan
manifested in Pakistani military incursions into IJK in 1965 and
1999and this clash between defense of the status quo and revisionism has dened the interstate territorial dimension of the dispute over Kashmir.
That has been a stalemated conict. Pakistani leaders from
Liaquat Ali Khan to Pervez Musharraf have consistently rejected
Indias preferred status quo solution as unacceptable, while India has countered Pakistans attempts, renewed in 1965 and then
in Kargil in 1999, to challenge the status quo through military
means.34 The nature of the international conict over Kashmir has
thus remained essentially unchangedindeed, static and frozen
over the fty-six years that have passed since its genesis. Even the
adversarial rhetoric used by both countries, for their domestic audiences as well as in international settings, has stayed remarkably

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similar in tone and content over this span of time. The real change
in the Kashmir conict has occurred in its internal dimension
specically, through the evolution of the relationship between
Kashmir and India in the decades since 1947. That relationship has
been deeply ruptured since 19891990, and the rupture has refocused attention on Kashmir as a problem for the subcontinent and
the world.

THE KASHMIR-INDIA DEBACLE

India is a bouquet. Kashmir is the rose in the bouquet.

Indian army billboards on roads in the Kashmir Valley
Hum kya chahtey? Azaadi! (What do we want? Freedom!)
Popular slogan in the Kashmir Valley

Kashmir was intended to be the centerpiece of

Indias bouquet of democratic diversity. Instead, it became the
thorn in the bouquet. Tracing the reasons for the rupture between India and Kashmir, which has engulfed most areas of Indian Jammu and Kashmir (IJK) in guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency since 1990, is crucial to understanding the contemporary
Kashmir conict and to identifying what needs to be done about
it. As we shall see, the rupture has very largely been caused by
consistently anti-democratic, authoritarian policies of successive
New Delhi governments toward IJK.
In November 1951 Sheikh Abdullah addressed the opening ses-

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sion of his hand-picked Jammu and Kashmir Constituent Assembly in these terms: The real character of a state is revealed in its
Constitution. The Indian Constitution [enacted in January 1950]
has set before the country the goal of secular democracy based
on justice, freedom and equality for all without distinction . . .
The national movement in our State [Jammu and Kashmir] naturally gravitates towards these principles of secular democracy . . .
This afnity in political principles, as well as past associations and
our common path of suffering in the cause of freedom, must be
weighed properly while deciding the future of the State.1
In August 1952 Abdullah repeated the same theme while informing the assembly that negotiations with Prime Minister Nehru
had reafrmed IJKs autonomous status within the Indian Union:
The supreme guarantee of our relationship with India is the
identity of democratic and secular aspirations, which have guided
the people of India as well as those of Jammu and Kashmir in
their struggle for emancipation, and before which all constitutional safeguards [Article 370 of the Indian constitution, the autonomy statute for IJK] will take a secondary position.2 Abdullah did
add a note of caution, as well as a thinly veiled warning, in the
same speech: I would like to make it clear that any suggestion of
arbitrarily altering this basis of our relationship with India would
not only constitute a breach of the spirit and letter of the Constitution, but might invite serious consequences for a harmonious
association of our State with India.3
In 1968, during a brief interlude of liberty from twenty-two
years (19531975) of almost continuous incarceration in Indian prisons, Abdullah said: The fact remains that Indian democracy
stops short at Pathankot [the last major town in Indian eastern
Punjab before the Jammu region of IJK]. Between Pathankot and
the Banihal [a mountain pass that connects the Jammu region

46

with the Kashmir Valley] you may have some measure of democracy, but beyond Banihal there is none. What we have in Kashmir
bears some of the worst characteristics of colonial rule. In a message to the people of India on the occasion of Indias Republic
Day on 26 January 1968, the Kashmiri leader added:
Respect for the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, the integrity of the electoral processare all
sought to be guaranteed by the Indian constitution. It is
not surprising that many other countries have drawn
upon this constitution, particularly the chapter on fundamental rights. Yet it must at all times be remembered
that the constitution provides the framework, and it is
for the men who work it to give it life and meaning. In
many ways the provisions of the constitution have been
agrantly violated in recent years [in Kashmir] and the
ideals it enshrines completely forgotten. Forces have
arisen which threaten to carry this saddening and destructive process further still.4

Abdullah was no paragon of liberal democracy. Indeed, as noted

in Chapter 1, his movement had deeply authoritarian traits. These
were latent during the phase of mass mobilization until 1947,
but became manifest as soon as the National Conference (NC)
became effectively the government of IJK after late 1947. Between
1948 and 1953, as head of this government, Abdullahwith Nehru
and New Delhis essential supportran IJK as a party-state efdom of the NC, and the Lion of Kashmirs founding contribution
to the entrenchment and perpetuation of anti-democratic politics
in IJK is beyond dispute. As Benedict Anderson has put it:
The model of ofcial nationalism assumes relevance,
above all, at the moment when revolutionaries success-

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fully take control of the state, and are for the rst time
in a position to use state power in pursuit of their visions . . . Even the most radical revolutionaries always,
to some degree, inherit the state from the fallen regime
. . . Like the complex electrical system in a large mansion where the owner has ed, the state awaits the new
owners hand at the switch to be very much its old brilliant self again. One should therefore not be much surprised as revolutionary leaderships come to play lord of
the manor . . . The more the ancient dynastic state is
neutralized, the more its antique nery can be wrapped
around revolutionary shoulders.5

Nonetheless, Abdullahs bitter reassessment of Indias democracy in its relationship to Kashmir was powerfully accurate. His
words capture with chilling eloquence the root cause of the Kashmir conict as it exists in the early twenty-rst century. His prognosis for the futurethat the saddening and destructive process
of New Delhisponsored subversion of democratic rights, processes, and institutions in Kashmir would continuealso proved
prophetic.

It is March 1987. Almost two decades have passed since Sheikh

Abdullah spoke his mind with such clarity and conviction. Elections are being held in IJK to constitute a legislative assembly and
government. Two men are competing to win a seat in this assembly from Amirakadal, a congested district in the heart of Srinagar,
capital city of the Kashmir Valley. One, Ghulam Mohiuddin Shah,
is the candidate of the National Conference, led since the sheikhs
death in 1982 by his elder son, Farooq Abdullah. The NC, by
now far removed from its popular base and very much the tool of

48

the vested interests of a narrow political elite, has allied in this

election with Congress, Indias ruling party. Ghulam Mohiuddin
Shahs opponent, Mohammad Yusuf Shah, is representing a polyglot coalition of anti-establishment groups calling itself the Muslim United Front (MUF).
As an Indian newsmagazine observes during the campaign, the
MUF is an improvised ad hoc bloc of diverse groups with no
real unifying ideology, consisting of educated youth, illiterate
working-class people and farmers who express their anger at the
Abdullahs family rule, government corruption and lack of economic development. However, its emergence means that the
Valley is sharply divided between the party machine that brings
out the traditional vote for the NC, and hundreds of thousands
who have entered politics as participants for the rst time under
the umbrella provided by the MUF. Khemlata Wakhloo, a
Kashmiri Pandit who was at that time a prominent member of
the NC, has written subsequently of a wave of popular support
for the MUF in the Valley and contiguous enclaves of Kashmirispeaking Muslims in the Jammu region. In her words, in 1987
there was only one voice on the lips of the people, that in a democracy we would bring the party of our choice to power, a party
that will meet the aspirations of the people and heed their grievances. Indeed, the MUFs message of Kashmiri regional pride
and its call for responsible government has attracted a huge army
of Kashmiri youth as volunteer workers. For the rst time in IJKs
political history, it seems that a popularly based but constitutionally
bound and sanctioned opposition to traditional, New Delhibacked
ruling coteries may be taking shape in the Valley and its environs.6
Turnout is heavy. As counting of ballots begins, it becomes
clear that the MUFs Yusuf Shah, a member of a conservative
religious party called the Jamaat-i-Islami, is winning by a land-

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slide. This is his third attempt to be elected to the IJK assembly,

and nally the public seems to be en masse on his side. The other
Shah, routed in the contest, leaves the counting center in a visibly dejected mood and goes home. But he is summoned back
to be declared the winner by presiding ofcials. As the crowd
protests, police arrive in strength and summarily arrest the MUF
candidate and his supporters, including his election manager,
Mohammad Yasin Malik, a twenty-one-year-old resident of the adjoining lowermiddle-class Maisuma neighborhood. Both candidate
and manager are imprisoned until the end of 1987, without any
formal charge or court appearance, let alone a trial.
The fate of Yusuf Shahs third and nal attempt to become
a legislator in Indias Kashmir assembly is replicated throughout
the Valley and some parts of the Jammu region. The Indian newsmagazine mentioned above recorded what happened in Kashmir
in spring 1987. Its eyewitness report speaks of a pattern of rigging and strong-arm tactics all over the Valley, of massive boothcapturing [forcible takeover of polling stations] by gangs, of entire ballot-boxes pre-stamped in favour of NC, of numerous citizens simply not being allowed to vote, and of governmentnominated supervisors stopping the counting as soon as they
saw opposition candidates taking a lead. Meanwhile, the bureaucrats and clerks administering the process worked blatantly in favour of the NC-Congress alliance, and the police refused to listen to any complaint. In an anticlimactic outcome, MUF won
just four of seventy-six seats in the IJK assembly (although even
according to the ofcial count it won 32 percent of the vote). The
NC-Congress alliance took an overwhelming majoritysixty-two
seatsand formed the government.7
As we shall see, this atrocious episode of denial and subversion
of democratic rights, processes, and institutions was no aberra-

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tion: it was entirely consistent with Kashmirs political fate in Indias democracy over the preceding forty years. More than sixteen
years after that tragic farce, both Shahs who contested that race in
1987 are still active in politics. Ghulam Mohiuddin Shah, loser
turned victor, was compelled to ee his homeland in early 1990, as
popular uprising and guerrilla war overwhelmed the Valley. But
he resurfaced in 1996 as a senior minister in an Indian-sponsored
IJK government revived after dubious elections, and he continued in that position until 2002. However, it is his challenger, Yusuf
Shah, who has really emerged from relative obscurity since 1987
but not under that name. Yusuf Shah now goes by his nom de
guerre, Syed Salahuddin (Salahuddin was a legendary Muslim warrior who fought against the Christian Crusaders). As Salahuddin,
Yusuf Shah has since the early 1990s been commander in chief of
Hizb-ul Mujahideen (HM), the largest guerrilla force ghting Indian control of IJK. In 1992 he told an Indian interviewer that he
had chosen to ght for the cause of Pakistan in Kashmir because
experience had convinced him that slaves have no vote in the socalled democratic set-up of India.8
As Yusuf Shah metamorphosed into Salahuddin, his young campaign manager of 1987, Yasin Malik, also made a personal choice
and a political transition. In 1989 Malik returned to the Valley
from Pakistani-controlled Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), where
he had procured weapons and trained in their use, and became a
core member of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front ( JKLF)
group that launched insurrection in the Valley. Unlike his former
candidate, Malik rejected the option of supporting Pakistan and
remained committed to the goal of an independent, sovereign
Jammu and Kashmir encompassingat least at the level of JKLF
rhetoricthe entire territory of the princely state as it existed in
1947. In May 1989 Malik, by then an underground militant, discussed his months in captivity in 1987 with an Indian interviewer:

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They called me a Pakistani bastard. I told them I wanted my

rights, my vote was stolen. I am not pro-Pakistan but have lost
faith in India.9

The Kashmir conict is driven by a complex of multiple, intersecting sources, and the Kashmir problem is, consequently, dened
by multiple, interlocking dimensions. Nonetheless, the ruptured
relationship between the majority of IJKs peopleespecially its
Kashmiri-speaking Muslim populationand the Indian Union is
the core of the contemporary problem. The guerrilla war in IJK
has passed through a number of phases since 1990, but the gap
between democratic aspirations and a repressive reality remains
wide in Indias Kashmir.
Handwara is a town located in the northwestern part of the
Kashmir Valley, in the frontier district of Kupwara close to the
Line of Control (LOC) with AJK. The town was taken and briey
held by tribal raiders from Pakistan in late 1947. On 1 October
1990 the towns bazaarthe center of life in all Kashmir towns
was burned down and a number of civilians were killed by Indian
security forces after a guerrilla attack. Since then, the town itself
heavily garrisoned and guarded by Indian police and military
unitshas been largely quiet, although on 6 August 2002 two
guerrillas and an Indian soldier were killed when the guerrillas
tried to storm the main security post in the center of town, a
mini-complex of bunkers and improvised ring positions festooned with Indian ags and Indian nationalist slogans. But the
calm has always been deceptive and deeply uneasy. Kupwaras
Handwara tehsil (administrative subdivision), named after the
town, has been a major theater of the guerrilla war since 1990.
The dozens of villages in the tehsil have produced hundreds if
not thousands of militants (guerrilla ghters)and, of course,

52

martyrsover the years, and Kupwaras extensive tracts of forested hills have been a sanctuary and base for the militants war
against the Indian army, which is heavily deployed in the tehsil and
throughout the district.
When I spent a few days in Handwara in late April and early
May of 2002, there was an unusual air of excitement in the town.
An election was about to take place to select a president for the
traders federation, the towns guild and chamber of commerce.
The electorate comprised 899 shopkeepers and traders operating in the town. The bazaar (rebuilt since 1990) was abuzz, especially because the contest reected a larger political conict. One
of the two candidates, Ghulam Din Banday, was an associate of
Chaudhary Mohammed Ramzan, then the towns NC legislator
and a senior minister in the Srinagar government. His rival,
Ghulam Mohiuddin So, belonged to a local family with strong
ties to the All-Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), the coalition
of groups favoring self-determination descended from the MUF
of 1987 (the Arabic word hurriyat means freedom). So himself
was afliated with an APHC constituent called the Peoples Conference (PC), a local party very popular in Kupwara and pockets
of the neighboring Baramulla district, founded and led by a veteran Kashmiri politician, Abdul Ghani Lone, a Handwara native.
(Lone was assassinated in Srinagar, in an unrelated development,
on 21 May 2002.) One of Sos younger brothers, Imtiyaz, a lawyer
practicing in the high court in Srinagar, is a senior member of the
independentist JKLF.
When the votes were counted, So had won by forty-ve votes.
The local police pronounced the process transparent. We
thought it is such a small affair so let us try to have an absolutely
free and fair election, said an ofcer, adding that this was the
rst such democratic process, even if at such a local level, happening after so many years. But the NCs hierarchy refused to accept

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the outcome. First the two local police ofcers who had worked
to ensure a fair poll were transferred out of the area, in the public interest. Then local bureaucrats were pressured to annul the
result. When this failed, the defeated candidate declared the election invalid and formed his own, parallel traders and shopkeepers association with the support of the Srinagar authorities. So
reacted with weary disgust, recalling the elections of 1983, when
Lone, the PCs candidate for an assembly seat, had been rst declared the loser and later the winner; and 1987, when Lone had
been ruled the loser although according to local people he had in
fact won with a huge majority, like Yusuf Shah in central Srinagar.
Fraud is the NCs habit, So said. They did it in 1983 when they
announced that we had lost the Assembly election by seven votes.
Then they did it again in 1987. I was Mr Lones counting agent
then, so I was picked up from the counting center and taken to
Srinagar central jail . . . We dont want to repeat it ever. We neither trust them nor their elections.10
The narrative of politics in Amirakadal, Srinagar, in 1987 offers
a compelling insight into Kashmirs descent into violence. The
narrative of Handwara, north Kashmir, in 2002 provides an
equally compelling insight into why the conict drags on, sixteen
years and tens of thousands of violent deaths later. Unfortunately,
the purposeful denial of democratic rights has been the dening
theme of democratic Indias policy toward Kashmir consistently
since 1947.

Sheikh Abdullah was IJKs prime minister from March 1948 to August 1953. His crowning achievement during those years was the
implementation of land reform (described in Chapter 1), which
consolidated mass support for the NC and for Abdullah himself. Besides abolishing the feudal system in agrarian Kashmir,

54

Abdullah also eliminated the hereditary monarchy, which had in

any event become inconsequential after October 1947. By 1952 the
Dogra monarchy was formally abolished, IJK proclaimed a republic, and the last kings son, the erstwhile heir-apparent Karan
Singh, relegated to a largely ceremonial position styled Sadr-eRiyasat (Head of State).
As noted in Chapter 1, the NC-led movements conception of
politics was built on a Jacobin vision of popular sovereignty. The
tension between this ideology and core principles of a liberaldemocratic polity remained latent during the mass mobilization
phase of the 1930s and 1940s, but rapidly became overt once the
movements leaders seized power. In early 1951 the NC government began preparations to convene a Constituent Assembly in
Srinagar. An alarmed Pakistan immediately raised the matter at
the United Nations, where the Security Council responded with a
resolution, passed in late March 1951, reminding the Governments and Authorities concerned of the principle embodied in the
Security Council resolutions of 21 April 1948, 3 June 1948 and 14
March 1950, and United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan resolutions of 13 August 1948 and 5 January 1949, that the nal
disposition of the State of Jammu and Kashmir will be made in
accordance with the will of the people, expressed through the
democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite conducted
under the auspices of the United Nations. The resolution further
warned that the convening of a Constituent Assembly as recommended by the general council of the All Jammu and Kashmir
National Conference, and any action that Assembly might attempt to take to determine the future shape and afliation of the
entire State, or any part thereof, would not constitute a disposition of the State in accordance with the above principle.11
Abdullah and his colleagues went ahead nonetheless, and a

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Constituent Assembly of seventy-ve deputies was elected, theoretically on the basis of universal adult franchise and secret ballot,
in the autumn of 1951. This assembly comprised forty-three representatives from the Kashmir Valley, thirty from the Jammu region,
and two from Ladakh. Twenty-ve additional seats were left vacant for the areas of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, making a nominal total of one hundred. The manner in which this election was
conducted made a mockery of any pretence of a democratic process, and set a grim precedent for future free and fair elections
in IJK.
In the Kashmir Valley and Ladakh, forty-three NC candidates
were returned unopposed one week prior to the election. NonNC candidates who had led nomination papers for the other
two seats withdrew under pressure subsequently, according to
Joseph Korbel of the United Nations Commission for India and
Pakistan. Muslim opposition to Abdullahs regime had been
eviscerated by the division of Jammu and Kashmir. The Muslim
Conferences following was largely concentrated in the western
Jammu districts making up AJK, safely beyond the ceasere line,
and MC supporters from IJKs Jammu districts had ed to AJK.
Leaders of the minority pro-Pakistan opinion in the Kashmir Valley, opposed to the NC, were also in exile in Pakistani-controlled
territory. However, a non-Muslim opposition to the new dispensation was present in the Hindu-dominated southern and southeastern districts of the Jammu region. Led mostly by ofcials in the
former maharajas administration and subsequently also by Hindu
landlords dispossessed by the NC regimes land reforms, these elements had organized a party called the Praja Parishad (literally,
Subjects Forum) in late 1947 and had been locked in confrontation with Abdullahs government since 1949. The Parishad decided
to ex its muscles by contesting twenty-eight of thirty seats in

56

the Jammu region, although its base was limited to a segment

of the Hindu population in parts of Jammu. Thirteen Parishad
candidates were arbitrarily disqualied before the electionin
ofcial parlance, their nomination papers were rejected because
of irregularitiesthe rst use of a common method by which
oppositions in IJK were to be neutered in years and decades to
come. In protest, and in anticipation of a completely rigged election that was pointless to contest, the Parishad announced an eleventh-hour boycott and pulled out its other fteen nominees. NonNC candidates in the remaining two Jammu seats also dropped
out, giving the NC a clean sweep before any votes had been cast.
The circumstances of formation of the Constituent Assembly
revealed that the NC elite wished to govern Kashmir as a partystate, in which they would have a monopoly on political power.
Indeed, the NCs slogan was One Leader, One Party, One
Programmemeaning Abdullah, the National Conference, and
the 1944 Naya Kashmir agenda. In fact, fragments of opposition
to the Abdullah regime existed even in the Valley, where the NC
was overwhelmingly popular as the agent of opposition to the
Dogra autocracy before 1947 and of land reform after 1947.
Ghulam Mohiuddin Karra, formerly chief of the NC organization
in Srinagar district and a moving force of the Quit Kashmir movement in 1946, had fallen out with the party leadership after 1947.
Purged, he formed a group called the Jammu and Kashmir Political Conference. As Abdullah consolidated his absolute power,
Balraj Puri, a political activist in Jammu, met with Prime Minister
Nehru in Delhi and appealed to him to ensure that Karras group
be allowed to function as a democratic opposition in the Valley, on
the grounds that one-party rule was antithetical to Indias commitment to a liberal-democratic polity. Nehru, Puri later recalled,
conceded the theoretical soundness of my argument, but main-

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tained that Indias Kashmir policy revolved around Abdullah, and

therefore nothing should be done to weaken him. In June 1952
Nehru told a press conference in India: When the Constituent
Assembly met in Kashmir for the rst time I might inform you
that it was its intention to pass forthwith a resolution conrming
the States accession to India. We asked it not to do so as not to be
embarrassed before the United Nations.12
The Praja Parishad would probably have won a few seats in
the Constituent Assembly had a free election been tolerated in
Jammu. It would then have functioned as a small opposition
group in the house, a potentially troublesome presence the NC
leadership was not willing to risk. Denied institutional representation, the Parishad took to the streets to press its case for full integration of Jammu and Kashmir State with the rest of India like
other acceding [princely] States and [to] safeguard the legitimate
democratic rights of the people of Jammu from the communistdominated anti-Dogra government of Sheikh Abdullah.13 Its rallying cry was Ek Vidhan, Ek Nishan, Ek Pradhan (one constitution, one ag, one premier) for all of Indiaa direct attack on
Abdullahs prime minister title, on the adoption in late 1949 of
the NCs party ag as the IJK state ag, and above all, on the constitution-making mandate of the IJK Constituent Assembly. The
Parishads strategy of direct action and civil disobedience had extremely disruptive consequences for IJKs fragile political order.
The protest campaign intensied through 1952 and the rst half of
1953 in areas of southern Jammu where the Parishad had inuence. The agitation received support from the spiritual and political leader of Ladakhs Tibetan Buddhists, who disliked the meteoric ascendancy of the new Kashmiri Muslim ruling elite and
particularly feared the implications of its land reform policies for
the Buddhist clergys immense private landholdings in Ladakh.

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The governments response was reminiscent of the former

Dogra regimes tacticspolice action against agitators and mass
arrests of the organizers, most of whom had been imprisoned
for the rst time as soon as the Parishad raised its voice in 1949.
The agitating Jammu and Ladakh factions represented social and
political reaction, but they also reected the social and political
plurality of IJK. It was ultimately the new regimes intolerance of
that plural character, rst of any opposition within the legislature and then of dissent on the streets, that drove the crisis. The
confrontation did not remain conned to IJK. From mid-1952 onward, Indias Hindu nationalist parties began, inside and outside
Indias Parliament, to draw attention to the issue and pressure
Nehrus Congress government to intervene. In May 1953 a prominent Hindu nationalist politician entered IJK to support the
Parishads campaign and was arrestedmuch as Nehru had
courted arrest in support of the NCs campaigns in the 1940s
and the situation soured further when he died, of natural causes,
while imprisoned in the Kashmir Valley. The ultimate aim of the
supporters of full integration was to eliminate the political autonomy given to IJK under Indias constitutional provisions. In the
Hindu nationalists unitary conception of sovereignty, IJK should
not have the trappings of a state within a stateincluding a prime
minister, a ag, and a constitution. The autonomy issue lay at the
heart of the relationship between India and Kashmir and would
determine its future.
The maharajas accession to India in October 1947 had limited
the jurisdiction of Indias central government to three categories
of subjects: defense, foreign affairs, and communications. This
was standard practice for rulers of princely states signing accession statements, and normally did not preempt or preclude further integration of acceding entities into the political framework

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of India or Pakistan. Jammu and Kashmir, however, was an exceptional case among former princely states, in that there was an international dispute over its status and U.N. resolutions existed calling for settlement of the question through a plebiscite. There was
also an important internal political reality that Indias leaders
had to take into accountthe existence in IJK of a well-organized
regionalist popular movement, the NC. In October 1949 Indias
Constituent Assembly inserted Article 306A in Indias constitution,
afrming that New Delhis jurisdiction in IJK would remain limited to the three categories of subjects specied in the Instrument
of Accession. This was qualied at the time as a provisional measure, pending nal settlement of the Kashmir dispute. After India
became a republic in January 1950, Article 306A became the basis
of Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which asserts Jammu and
Kashmirsfor practical purposes, IJKsautonomy within the
Indian Union. Under Article 370s provisions, Indias federal government can legislate even on the three categories of subjects
within its competence only in consultation with the Government
of Jammu and Kashmir State, and on other subjects in the Union
List only with the nal concurrence of the Jammu and Kashmir
Assembly.14
We saw at the outset of this chapter that during key points of
his ve and a half years in ofce Sheikh Abdullah repeatedly justied his movements decision to side with India in the ringing rhetoric of ideological and programmatic afnity. In his opening
address to the IJK Constituent Assembly in November 1951, for
example, he praised Indias democratic and secular credentials,
derided Pakistan as a landlord-ridden country without a written
constitution, and dismissed full independence for Kashmir as a
utopian idea. There are indications, nonetheless, that the sheikh
privately viewed the association with India in far more contingent

60

terms, as a strategic necessity given the circumstances and the

alignment of political forces in 1947, and that he retained a subliminal attachment to the idea of a sovereign Kashmir.
In April 1949, shortly after the cessation of fourteen months
of ghting between India and Pakistan in and over Kashmir,
Abdullah spoke candidly in an interview with a British newspaper, the London Observer. He lamented not only the division of
Jammu and Kashmir through war but the prospect, unacceptable
to a Kashmiri patriot, that the territory would remain indenitely
trapped in the vortex of a bitter feud between the two countries.
The people of the contested territory would never enjoy either
peace or prosperity in such a context, since because of its location
as well as its fractured internal politics, J&K needed the goodwill,
the tourists, and the markets of both countries for its stability. The
only way out, he reected, would be for J&K to have a neutral and
friendly status vis--vis both India and Pakistan. However, since
the Punjabis of Poonch and the Pathans of Gilgit favored Pakistan, while the Hindus of Jammu were loyal to India, an independent states territorial integrity would need to be recognized
and guaranteed not only by India and Pakistan but by world powers and the United Nations. Abdullahs remarks raised great alarm
in the Indian capital. Nehrus deputy prime minister Vallabhbhai
Patel, a hard-line right-wing Indian nationalist, apparently took
particular objection, and Abdullah recanted in an interview with a
major Indian newspaper, The Hindu, a month later in May 1949.15
Three years after that, in April 1952, Abdullah was in his populist element again. In response to the Praja Parishad agitation
for abolition of IJKs autonomous regime, he delivered a combative speech in the town of Ranbirsinghpura, near the southern
city of Jammu. The venue was perhaps deliberately chosen:
Ranbirsinghpura is on the border of Indian Jammu and Pakistani

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Punjab, it has been a predominantly Hindu area since 1947, and

it derives its name from one of the kings of the Dogra dynasty.
In this Praja Parishad heartland, Abdullah attacked what he described as the insidious inuence of Hindu majoritarian ideas in
the Congress party and the central government, and referred to
the full integration movement as unrealistic, childish and savoring of lunacy.16 His speech was widely reported in the Indian
press and deepened the controversy. To calm the rst crisis of
Kashmir-India relations, negotiations were held in Delhi in June
and July 1952 between a delegation of the IJK government led by
Abdullah and his cabinet minister Mirza Afzal Beg and Indian government representatives headed by Nehru.
The talks resulted in an unwritten modus vivendi known as the
Delhi Agreement, whose contents were reported to Indias Parliament by Nehru on 24 July 1952, and to IJKs Constituent Assembly
by Abdullah on 11 August. The agreement largely preserved the
status quo on IJKs autonomous status. In his 11 August speech,
Abdullah was explicit that his aim had been to preserve maximum autonomy for the local organs of state power, while discharging obligations as a unit of the [Indian] Union.17 It was
agreed that the IJK ag and Indias national ag would y side by
side in IJK, with the latter in the supremely distinctive position.
Otherwise, the Kashmiri delegation made only one substantive
concession, enabling extension of the Indian supreme courts arbitrating jurisdiction to IJK in case of disputes between the federal
center and the state (IJK) or between IJK and another unit of the
Union.
Even here, however, IJK negotiators blocked an attempt by the
New Delhi team to extend the Indian supreme courts purview to
IJK as the ultimate court of appeal for all civil and criminal cases
before IJK courts. The IJK team also managed to stall on two

62

other matters under negotiation: nancial and scal integration of

IJK with the Union, and the extension of the Indian constitutions
fundamental rights to the territory and people of IJK. During
discussions on the latter issue, the IJK delegation objected citing
possible implications for their land reform program, which had
dispossessed the landowning class without any right to claim compensation. On more general principles of the Kashmir-India relationship, it was agreed that residual powers of legislation would
be vested in the IJK assembly, in contrast to the arrangement elsewhere in Indias relatively centralized federation, which vests such
powers in the center.
Supercially, the Delhi Agreement appeared to be a victory for
the Abdullah governments resolute defense of IJKs asymmetrical
autonomy within the Indian Union. In his condent report of
the outcome of the Delhi talks to his hand-picked legislature,
Abdullah, as noted earlier, adopted his typical twin tactics of celebrating the ideological afnity of India and Kashmir in glowing
terms while ominously warning the Indian government against
unilateral attempts at centralization and integration. But over the
following year it became clear that the NC government had
merely managed to negotiate a temporary, uneasy truce in an unresolved tussle with New Delhi in which anti-autonomy factions
in Jammu and Ladakh continued to be an important factor. The
anti-autonomy, pro-integration agitations intensied in the rst
half of 1953, and Indias Hindu nationalist parties directly entered
the fray.
In April 1953 Abdullah appeared to be looking for a compromise solution to the crisis. In that month the Constituent Assemblys basic principles committee proposed a scheme for devolution
of authority to regions within IJK. Under the plan, the Kashmir
Valley and Jammu regions would each have elected assemblies

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with competence to legislate on specied subjects of local governance, as well as separate councils of ministers for regional affairs.
(Ladakh, with its sparse population, would have a lesser degree
of internal autonomy, exercised by an elected district council.)
This formula of multi-tiered autonomy clearly aimed at a creative mutual accommodationpreserving IJKs autonomous regime while devolving powers within that regime to placate the
groups in Jammu (and Ladakh) opposed to that regime. Indeed,
the committee proposed an eventual union of ve unitsincluding Poonch (Azad Jammu and Kashmir) and Gilgit (the
Northern Areas) across the LOCand suggested changing the
name of the interim three-unit entity to Autonomous Federated
Unit of the Republic of India, terminology borrowed from the
Soviet Unions model of multi-tiered ethno-territorial federalism.
Fifty years later, these ideas remain relevant to dealing with the internal complexity of the Kashmir problem, although, in 2003 as in
1953, an essential prerequisite is the democratization of IJKs political life to guarantee civil liberties and rights of participation and
representation to all segments of the territorys rainbow spectrum
of political opinion and allegiance.
The compromise scheme rapidly foundered on the treacherous
internal shoals of IJK politics. The sectarian Jammu and Ladakh
factionsand their external supporters and adviserswere interested in nothing short of total overthrow of the autonomous
regime and a settling of scores with Abdullah and company. They
refused the bait. The picture was further complicated by the
matryoshka-doll character of IJK society and politics. A huge portion of Indian Jammus land area11,500 of 26,293 square kilometersconsists of a mountain district called Doda, which has three
tehsilsDoda, Kishtwar, and Bhaderwah. The Doda district has a
Muslim majority (57 percent in 1981) of mainly Kashmiri-speakers,

64

an ethno-cultural and political spillover from the Kashmir Valley

to the immediate north. These Kashmiri-speaking Muslims,
largely adherents of the NC, refused to be part of an autonomous
Hindu-majority Jammu region and declared their unbreakable
identity with the Valley. From the 1960s to the present day, sectarian Hindu political groups in the Jammu region have intermittently agitated for totally detaching the Indian Jammu region
which has an overall Hindu majority, concentrated in its southern districtsfrom the Kashmir Valley. It was pointed out as early
as the mid-1960s that this demand is blind to the social and political complexities of the Jammu region. Specically, the three
Muslim-majority districtsDoda, Rajouri, and Poonchof Indian Jammus six districts would, then as now, almost certainly
refuse to be bracketed with Dogra Hindus and prefer to stay with
the Valley Muslims.18
In May 1953 Sheikh Abdullah switched from compromise to
confrontation. The NCs highest policymaking body, its working
committee, appointed a subcommittee to examine constitutional
options for IJK, and for J&K as a whole. The subcommittee had
eight membersve Muslims from the Kashmir Valley including
Abdullah, a Kashmiri Pandit, a Sikh, and a Dogra from Jammu
(thus, counting the Pandit representative, six members were from
the Valley, the partys stronghold). On 9 June the special committee put forward four possible options for Kashmirs future, all involving a plebiscite and/or independence for part or whole of the
disputed territory. The rst and favored option called for a plebiscite in the entire territory to determine the core issue of legitimate sovereignty. Unlike the U.N. resolutions, which expressly
limited the choice to India or Pakistan, the subcommittee unanimously recommended, on the suggestion of the NCs general secretary, Maulana Masoodi, that the J&K electorate be offered a

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third optionfull independence. Abdullah refused to soften this

stance during July, in correspondence with Nehru and Indias education minister, Abul Kalam Azad. Instead, he decided to summon
the NCs working committee and general council in late August
to ratify the new line, and planned to go public with his stance on
21 August, the day of a major Muslim religious celebration.
The summer of 1953 was a decisive and fateful time for Kashmir. In early August a major rift appeared within the top NC
leadership. The rift divided Abdullahs ve-member cabinet, with
Abdullah and his loyalist Mirza Afzal Beg outnumbered by the
dissident faction comprising Shyamlal Saraf (a Kashmiri Pandit),
Giridharilal Dogra (a Jammu Hindu), and signicantly, Bakshi
Ghulam Mohammed, Abdullahs deputy prime minister and a Valley Muslim. The power struggle tilted against Abdullah when the
pro-communist bloc within the NC joined with the dissident ministers in rejecting Abdullahs confrontational, pro-independence
strategy. This group, led by the Constituent Assembly speaker
G. M. Sadiq and including D. P. Dhar, a Pandit deputy minister of
interior, was inuenced by the Soviet Unions shifting posture on
the Kashmir dispute. In 1948 the Soviet propaganda organ New
Times had hailed Abdullah as the leader of a progressive and
democratic mass movement and condemned the alleged interference of Indian reactionaries in Kashmir. By 1953 the same paper was calling the Kashmir question an internal affair of India
and decrying alleged imperialist [American-led] efforts to turn
the Valley into a strategic bridgehead.19 Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed seems to have been motivated primarily by personal ambition, above all the prospect of displacing the Lion of Kashmir as
leader of Kashmir. For Hindu NC leadersSaraf, Dogra, and possibly Dharallegiance to India appears to have been the deciding
factor.

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The outcome of the power struggle shaped New Delhi

Srinagar relations, and the pattern of politics within IJK, for the
next three and a half decades. On 9 August 1953 Sheikh Abdullah
was dismissed as prime minister by the nominal head of state,
Karan Singh, and arrested by police under a law called the Public
Security Act, used until then to persecute the sheikhs opponents.
He would remain incarcerated for the next twenty-two years, until 1975, barring brief spells out of prison in 1958, 19641965, and
1968. Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed took over as prime minister at
the head of a government purged of Abdullah loyalists. On 910
August, 33 other NC leaders, including the former cabinet minister Afzal Beg, were also arrested under the Public Security Act. By
October 1953 large majorities of Constituent Assembly delegates
(60 of 75) and members of the NC general council (90 of 110) formally ratied the new leadership in specially convened sessions.
Maulana Masoodi, the respected cleric who held the post of party
general secretary, was summarily removed for continuing to support Abdullah.
Despite appearances, these events bore telltale signs of a
putsch, executed at the behest of New Delhiwhose government
was the sovereign authority in IJK, at least according to the Instrument of Accessionby a clique of NC leaders. On 10 August
Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed issued his rst statement as prime
minister, denouncing Abdullah as an oppressive leader who had
become a tool of foreign conspiracies designed to undermine
Kashmirs indissoluble ties with India. In September 1953 Nehru
justied Abdullahs eviction from ofce before Indias Parliament
on the grounds that he had lost the condence of the majority
of his cabinet and by his actions caused distress to the people.
However, there was no convincing democratic justication for
Abdullahs arrest (and prolonged imprisonment in a Jammu jail).
Curiously, Nehru had agreed with the Pakistani government in

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August 1953 to set up a joint Indian-Pakistani committee of civilian and military experts to hold preliminary discussions on
organizing a Kashmir plebiscitethe same month Abdullah was
removed for resurrecting the plebiscite demand. Abdullahs detention, accompanied by mass arrests of key members of the NC
organization, purges, and unconvincing, possibly stage-managed
shows of loyalty to the new leadership, revealed the change of regime in Kashmir to be a narrowly based coup that needed to resort to such measures in order to succeed.
One senior member of the NC old guard, aligned with the leftist group in the party, who sided with the putschists and immediately became a cabinet minister in the new government, was Syed
Mir Qasim. In his memoirs, published in 1992, Qasim recorded
massive popular protests that swept the Valley after the sheikhs
overthrow and the brutal police methods used to suppress the disturbances. Qasims candid account suggests that the Indian-sponsored regime would have collapsed like a house of cards had the
sheikh been allowed to remain at liberty to organize and lead a
mass movement against it.20
The second half of 1953 signaled a decisive turning point in
the basis and nature of the relationship between Kashmir and India. The old NC conception had viewed that relationship as an
honorable partnership of equals. After 1953 this conception became history. From August 1953 onward, any deance of New
Delhis absolute supremacy in the relationship guaranteed not
only a swift passage to political oblivion but criminalization as an
enemy of the state. The fate suffered by a leader of Sheikh
Abdullahs stature sent out a very powerfuland unambiguous
message. Only those who unequivocally agreed to follow the Indian states agenda in Kashmir could aspire to ofce, or indeed,
could play any sort of role in institutionally sanctioned politics.
The problem was that this situation could be effected only at

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the expense of the consent of a large proportion of the governed.

Sheikh Abdullahs tenure was unmistakably authoritarian, his policies were somewhat divisive, and his decision to challenge New
Delhis supremacywhether for tactical purposes or otherwise
was possibly a reckless move by an overcondent populist politician. But his Kashmir rst line nonetheless struck a chord
among people in IJK, particularly in the Valley. That patriotic
stance, combined with the successful delivery of land reforms
in the rural sector, invested the charismatic sheikh with almost
saintly status in the eyes of many ordinary people, especially in
the Valley, and gave his authoritarian, dispute-prone regime more
than a critical mass of popular support. The post-1953 New Delhi
approved successor governments in IJK would be at least as authoritarian and considerably more corrupt, and they would lack
the signicant popular base that the sheikh, despite all his aws,
enjoyed.
Bakshi Ghulam Mohammeds term in ofce lasted a full decade, until October 1963. The sequence of events during that decade strongly suggests a contractual relationship between Bakshi
and the government of India, whereby he would be allowed to
run an unrepresentative, unaccountable government in Srinagar
in return for facilitating IJKs integration with India on New
Delhis terms. The result was twofold: a crippling of rule of law
and democratic institutions in IJK; and an erosion of IJKs autonomy, achieved (as required by Article 370) with the concurrence
of IJKs governmentwhich consisted of a motley clique of New
Delhis client politicians.
IJKs statutory autonomy had been proclaimed in 1950 by a
constitutional order formally issued in the name of the president
of India. In May 1954 another constitutional order was issued superseding the previous proclamation. The new communiqu ex-

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tended the central governments right to legislate in IJK to the

majority of subjects on the Union List. IJKs nancial and scal relations with New Delhi were placed on the same footing as those
of other, undisputed units of the Indian Union. The Indian supreme court now had full jurisdiction in IJK. The fundamental
rights of citizens guaranteed by Indias constitution were to apply
in IJK, but with a crucial caveat: these civil liberties could be suspended at any time at the discretion of IJK authorities in the interest of security, and no judicial reviews of the suspensions would
be allowed. In effect, this was carte blanche for the operation of a
draconian police state in IJK. The only concession to popular sentiment in the constitutional order was that it upheld the deposed
IJK governments policy of land reform without compensation.
Bakshi Ghulam Mohammeds government and legislature eagerly
consented, in February 1954, to the proposed roster of integrative
measures, as was legally and constitutionally necessary for their
validation. Bakshi informed the Constituent Assemblyin the absence of a dogged minority of pro-Abdullah deputiesthat Kashmir had irrevocably acceded to India more than six years ago and
today we are fullling the formalities of our unbreakable bonds
with India. On the oor of Indias Parliament, Prime Minister
Nehru welcomed the decision of the Constituent Assembly of
Kashmir as representing the wishes of the people of Kashmir. He
added that Indias international commitments on Kashmir were
still valid and that the Indian government planned to proceed
with them in due course in consultation with the Government of
Kashmir . . . unless something else happened.21
The developments of 1954 were the beginning of the end for
Article 370, which has effectively been dead in letter and in spirit
since that time. Strangely, the autonomy clause formally remains
in Indias constitution. Between the 1950s and the 1990s, successive

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Congress governments in New Delhi rejected demands by opposition Hindu nationalists for its formal removal from the constitution (Hindu nationalist ideology regards the existence of Article
370 as implying favoritism and special treatment for Indias sole
Muslim-majority state). However, when Hindu nationalists assumed power in India in the late 1990s, their governments continued the Congress practice of paying lip service to Article 370,
repudiating calls from their own extreme right wing for its elimination. This is understandable from the viewpoint of practical
politics. Article 370 has been a cipher for decades and its formal retention is an irrelevance.
In the mid-1950s, developments in international politics facilitated the Indian governments emerging Kashmir strategy. In the
late 1940s and early 1950s, Stalins Soviet Union was in a radical
ideological phase and derided Indias new democracy as a bourgeois hoax. By 1953the year of Stalins deaththe USSR had
changed its strategy. The emphasis was now on courting India as a
major Asian country whose foreign policy showed signs that it
might remain at least neutral, or non-aligned, in the Cold War.
The Soviet stance on Kashmir shifted accordingly, and the shift
was reinforced by Pakistans gradual gravitation toward regional
security alliances fostered across Asia by the United States to contain the Soviet Union.
Nehrus February 1954 speech to Indias Parliament on Kashmir
anticipated that something else might happen to inuence Indias Kashmir policy, and noted explicitly that Indias international
commitments on Kashmir were subject to changes which might
come about because of other events.22 In fact, the Indian prime
minister had already written to his Pakistani counterpart, Mohammed Ali Bogra, in November 1953, expressing grave concern
over Pakistans reported moves toward joining U.S.-sponsored re-

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gional military alliances in exchange for American military assistance which could be used against India, including in Kashmir,
and warning him that if Pakistan went ahead repercussions would
ensue for every question pending between the two countries.
Between April and September 1954 Pakistan formally entered the
American orbit. A military aid agreement providing for sending
American military equipment to Pakistan was signed in Karachi in
May 1954, and Pakistan joined the South-East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO, also known as the Manila Pact) in September
1954. It became a member of the Turkish-Iraqi mutual cooperation pact (also known as the Baghdad Pact, and later as the Central Treaty Organization or CENTO) in September 1955.
Pakistans alignment with the United States encouraged the
Soviet Unions emerging pro-India posture on Kashmir. In December 1955 the Soviet leaders Khrushchev and Bulganin visited
India and traveled to Srinagar. In Srinagar, Premier Khrushchev informed his audience: The people of Jammu and Kashmir want to
work for the well-being of their beloved countrythe Republic of
India. The people of Kashmir do not want to become toys in the
hands of imperialist powers. This is exactly what some powers are
trying to do by supporting Pakistan on the so-called Kashmir
question. It made us very sad when imperialist powers succeeded
in bringing about the partition of India [in 1947] . . . That Kashmir
is one of the States of the Republic of India has already been decided by the people of Kashmir. Marshal Bulganin referred to
Kashmir as this northern part of India and to its population as
part of the Indian people, who, he discerned, felt deep joy at
being included in India.23
Three months after this visit, in March 1956, Nehru told Indias
Parliament that a plebiscite in Kashmir was beside the point and
emphasized Pakistani aggression in Kashmir and the legality of

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Kashmirs [1947] accession to India, which, he claimed, had been

ratied by the IJK Constituent Assembly in 1954. Nehru publicly
said in April that he had offered Pakistans prime minister a permanent, de jure division of Jammu and Kashmir along the existing CFL a year earlier, in May 1955. Pakistani leaders rejected
Nehrus strange logic in linking the matter of Kashmir with Pakistans military alliances, and characterized the Soviet leaders
statements as extraordinary. But the die had been cast. In February 1957 the USSR exercised its U.N. Security Council veto for the
rst time during a discussion of Kashmir convened at Pakistans
initiative. This became a regular occurrence thereafter.24
Inside IJK, Bakshis regime rapidly became notorious for its two
salient attributes: rampant corruption, with ofcials looting the
exchequer at will; and Maa-style authoritarianism, marked by
liberal use of police and gangs of professional thugs against any
sign of opposition. In Delhi, Balraj Puri, the activist from Jammu,
once again met with Nehru to apprise him of this oppressive situation and ask him to ensure that pro-Abdullah elements be allowed some political space to operate in the Valley. Nehru, Puri
recalls, agreed that Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed was an extremely
unsavory individual, but argued that Indias case [on Kashmir]
now revolved around him and so despite all its shortcomings, the
Bakshi government had to be strengthened. Puri quotes Nehru
as saying that Kashmirs politics revolved around personalities
and hence there was no material for democracy there. In 1954 an
attempt by a left-wing all-India party, the Praja Socialist Party
(PSP), to set up a branch ofce in Srinagar was disrupted by a
gang of regime-sponsored hooligans. Nehrus reaction was to accuse the PSP of joining hands with the enemies of the country.25
Despite incessant harassment by the police state, efforts to organize a political opposition continued. In October 1954 four mem-

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bers of the Constituent Assembly formed an opposition group in

the legislature. This expanded within months to a caucus of eight
legislators. On 10 August 1955 this group, along with a nominated
Kashmiri representative in Indias Parliament, launched a political
movement calling itself the Jammu and Kashmir Plebiscite Front
(PF). Mirza Afzal Beg, Abdullahs loyal lieutenant, who had been
temporarily released from prison, became its rst president. The
PF stood for self-determination through a plebiscite under UN
auspices, withdrawal of the armed forces of both nations from
Kashmir, and restoration of civil liberties and free elections. On
23 August the IJK government banned public meetings, to prevent clashes between supporters and opponents of the Government, and all top leaders of the PF and its allied organizations
were subsequently arrested. Indeed, between 19 November 1955
and 29 September 1956 four presidents of the Plebiscite Front were
arrested, one after another, in a relentless cycle of repression.26
This intensied repression was related not only to changing international alignments on the Kashmir dispute, described earlier,
but to moves inside the Constituent Assembly. In OctoberNovember 1956 the Constituent Assembly was presented with a draft
constitution for IJK, which was rapidly approved by sixty-seven of
its seventy-ve membersthe remaining members were either
in gaol or had withdrawn from the proceedings. This document
started from the premise that the State of Jammu and Kashmir is
and shall be an integral part of the Union of India.27 The expression integral part, with its implications of nality, was subsequently made into a central maxim of the Indian state. Any reference to the people was now, as Nehru had said in March 1956,
entirely beside the point. From prison, Sheikh Abdullah wrote
protest letters to G. M. Sadiq, his former colleague and the procommunist speaker of the Assembly, and to Nehru. He received

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no replies. Only four opposition deputies were not in prison when

the draft constitution was placed before the house. They decided
to boycott the proceedings, but when Mirza Afzal Beg was released on 19 October they changed their mind and participated in
the discussion. On 22 October Beg moved a motion of adjournment for two weeks to enable Sheikh Abdullah to be present.
Sadiq [presiding] ruled the motion out of order whereupon Beg
and his followers [again] boycotted the proceedings . . . On 25 October Beg was re-arrested.28
In a symbolic gesture of allegiance, IJKs new constitution
which supposedly applies to the whole of J&K, including Pakistani-controlled areascame into effect on 26 January 1957, the
seventh anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic of India.
On 24 January 1957, at Pakistans initiative, the U.N. Security
Council passed a resolution in response to these developments. It
reiterated its 19481951 resolutions calling for a nal settlement in
accordance with the will of the people expressed through the
democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite conducted
under the auspices of the United Nations. It further reiterated
the afrmation in its resolution of 30 March 1951 . . . that the convening of a Constituent Assembly as recommended by the general council of the All Jammu and Kashmir National Conference
and any action the Assembly may have taken or might attempt to
take to determine the future shape and afliation of the entire
State or any part thereof, or action by the parties concerned [India
and Pakistan] in support of any such action by the Assembly,
would not constitute a disposition of the State in accordance with
the above principle. The resolution concludes with the assertion
that the Security Council . . . decides to continue its consideration of the dispute.29
The international status of the Kashmir question wasand is

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quite clear. But the United Nations was powerless to prevent developments in IJK from taking their course. After adopting the
constitution, the Constituent Assembly dissolved itself and fresh
elections were ordered to constitute a new IJK Legislative Assembly. In June 1957 the election process was completed. At rst
glance, the outcome appeared to represent a marginal improvement over the Constituent Assembly election of autumn 1951,
in which Abdullahs National Conference had secured 100 percent
of the 75 seats at stake. This time Bakshi Ghulam Mohammeds
NC obtained 69 seats92 percent of the total. However, only
28 seats were lled after any kind of contest (and balloting). Of
43 Kashmir Valley seats, 35 were won by ofcial NC candidates
without any contest. Across IJK, 30 NC candidates, including
Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, were returned unopposed and another 10 NC candidates were elected after nomination papers led
by opposing candidates were declared invalid. The ofcial in
charge of deciding whether nomination papers were valid or not
was Abdul Khaleq Malik, a Bakshi henchman. Of 8 seats in the
Valley where a nominal contest took place, 7 were won by NC
candidates against politically unknown persons standing in token
opposition, while the last was taken by a disgruntled Bakshi man
standing against the ofcial candidate. Twenty of the Jammu regions 30 seats witnessed a contesthere the NC won 14 seats, the
Praja Parishad elected 5, and a candidate representing a party of
low-caste Hindus bagged one seat. There was thus a small representation of opposition Hindu groups in the legislature, but representation of the majority Muslim population was effectively
monopolized by the New Delhisponsored establishment faction.
The 25 additional seats reserved for Pakistan-controlled Kashmir
of course remained vacant.
Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed was elected unopposed as head

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of the NC legislature party and hence as prime minister. Membership of the legislatures unelected, consultative upper house,
called the legislative council, was also monopolized by nominees
of the ofcial clique. In 1958 the Legislative Assembly gave its
concurrence, after due consultation with New Delhi, to the deployment of Indian staff from outside IJK in IJKs administration. Three decades later, in 1989, IJKs population was 65 percent Muslim, but of 22 senior-level ofcers in the IJK branch of
Indias professional civil service, only ve were Kashmiri-speaking
Muslims, and the Valleys tiny Pandit minority was hugely overrepresented in IJKs own civil service and among ofcers in its
banking system.30
IJKs next elections were held in 1962. The intervening years
were notable for Chinas entry into the international politics of
the Kashmir conict. Chinas relations with India deteriorated
precipitously after the Chinese annexation of Tibet in 1959, and
rising tensions ared into a military conict in late 1962 at a number of disputed border ashpoints stretching in an east-west arc
along the Himalayan ranges, including a desolate area called Aksai
Chin on Ladakhs frontier with Tibet and Chinas Xinjiang province. Indian forces were routed in the ghting, and India immediately began a massive program of expansion, reorganization, and
rearmament of its military.31 Since communist China was at the
time viewed as a major threat by the Western allies, the United
States began to supply some weapons and equipment to Indias
armed forces. This deeply offended Pakistan, which started to cultivate diplomatic and military ties with China in response.
In March 1963 the Chinese government signed an agreement
with the military regime then in power in Pakistan on delimitation of the boundary between Pakistans Northern Areas in J&K
and Chinas Xinjiang province (which has a large Muslim popula-

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tion and a history of political unrest). Under this agreement, the

Pakistanis ceded a sizeable chunk of territory in this remote region to China, exacerbating Indian fears of the emergence of a
Sino-Pakistani alliance against India. Article 6 of the boundary
agreement cleverly dealt with the unresolved international status
of the Kashmir question by specifying that after the settlement
of the Kashmir dispute between Pakistan and India, the sovereign
authority concerned will reopen negotiations with the Government of the Peoples Republic of China . . . so as to sign a boundary treaty to replace the present agreement . . . In the event of
that sovereign authority being Pakistan, the provisions of this
agreement shall be maintained.32
In IJK, the major development during these years was an internal schism in the ruling coterie. The split developed when Bakshi
Ghulam Mohammed failed to appoint any members of the proSoviet leftist faction to the cabinet he constituted after the 1957
elections. This group, led by G. M. Sadiq, then formed a separate party called the Democratic National Conference and was
joined by fteen legislators. In late 1960 a reconciliation was mediated by New Delhiostensibly to close ranks against the Chinese
threatand Sadiq and his followers were once again accommodated in the government. In elections held in 1962, the happily
reunited government party won 68 of 74 seats in IJKs Legislative
Assembly (the Praja Parishad got 3, and another 3 went to independents, including the chief Buddhist Lama of Ladakh). Of 43
constituencies in the Kashmir Valley, 32 were decided without a
contest. In 20 of these seats no other candidates led papers, in
8 electoral districts non-ofcial candidates who had led papers
withdrew before the polling date, and in another 4 the papers of
non-ofcial candidates were declared invalid. Bakshi and his cabinet colleagues Sadiq, Mir Qasim, and Khwaja Shamsuddin were

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all returned unopposed to the Assembly. The NC secured 41 of 43

seats in the Kashmir Valley and also won 27 of 30 seats from the
Jammu region, including 2 unopposed seats. In protest against
massive malpractices and a farcical process, a mass demonstration was held in Jammu city, jointly organized by a diverse spectrum of parties including the Praja Parishad, the socialist PSP, and
Akali Dal, a Sikh group. However, the prime minister of Kashmir
dismissed their complaints as frivolous.33
The years 19631965 were a volatile period in Kashmir. In October 1963 Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed reluctantly stepped down
as prime ministerapparently at the behest of his patrons in New
Delhi, where he was increasingly regarded as an embarrassment
who had outlived his usefulness. Before the 1962 elections, Nehru
urged the PSPthe leftist India-wide opposition party whose members he had described as enemies of the state in 1954 because
they opposed Bakshis strong-arm tacticsto eld candidates because recurrent unopposed elections in IJK were earning Indias
democracy a bad reputation. After the elections, Nehru wrote
to Bakshi that it would strengthen your position much more if
you lost a few seats to bonade opponents. Bakshi was replaced
as premier by one of his more obscure cabinet ministers, Khwaja
Shamsuddin. Bakshi, although ousted, still commanded the loyalty of the majority of party legislators and managed to fend off
the New Delhi-backed candidacy of his principal rival for the
coveted post, G. M. Sadiq. The new government subsequently
formed by Shamsuddin once again excluded Sadiq and his group
from ministerial appointments.34
In late December 1963 more than a decade of pent-up resentment nally exploded in the Kashmir Valley. The spark was provided by the theft of a religious relic, said to be a hair from the
head of the Prophet Mohammed, from Srinagars Hazratbal

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shrinewhich had been the NC-led movements headquarters in

19461947. In a peculiar turn of events, the holy hair reappeared in
the shrine on 3 January 1964, but in the meantime a central action
committee led by Maulana Masoodi, the former general secretary
of the National Conference had been formed for recovery of the
relic, and it had taken control of the city in the wake of a mass upsurge. Other leaders of this committee were G. M. Karra, who
had been Srinagar district chief of the NC in the 1940s, and Maulvi
Farooq, a mirwaiz (religious gure) of pro-Pakistan inclinations.35
The crisis was compounded by an outbreak of sectarian rioting
in the province of Bengal, more than three thousand kilometers
away in eastern India. During JanuaryFebruary 1964 the violence
claimed the lives of hundreds of minority Hindus in eastern Bengal (then East Pakistan) and hundreds of minority Muslims in Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal province in India. In the Kashmir
Valley, however,
leaders of the action committee, notably Masoodi and
Karra, warned against violence . . . Both did wonderful work in pacifying excited Muslim crowds during
the critical days of the holy relic restoration movement
when a small mistake could have soaked the Valley in
blood. But for Masoodi [Kashmirs top cleric] authentication of the restored relic would have been impossible and put the Indian authorities in tremendous difculty. Karras speeches, characterized by balance and
caution, produced a moderating inuence on the movement and kept agitated mobs under control. In a mass
meeting at Zadibal [near Srinagar] he advised
Kashmiris that while denouncing Hindu communalism
in India they should not overlook the atrocities of Mus-

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lim fanatics in East Pakistan. He incurred the wrath of

extremists but did not retract.36

The tumult over the stolen relic brought back mass collective
action to the Kashmir Valley and severely destabilized the Indiansponsored regime in IJK. In late February Shamsuddin was replaced as head of government by New Delhis favored candidate,
G. M. Sadiq, who packed a reconstituted cabinet with his own
loyalists like Mir Qasim and D. P. Dhar. Sadiq assessed the situation and quickly concluded that the only hope of preventing an
uprising was to take the risk of releasing Sheikh Abdullah, who
had been freed once before, in January 1958, but rearrested within
three months. Abdullah was released in April 1964, along with
his faithful comrade Afzal Beg. On 18 April Abdullah entered
Srinagar and was greeted by a delirious crowd of 250,000 people.
Srinagar was a blaze of color and everyone seemed out on the
streets to give Abdullah a heros welcome . . . Addressing a huge
gathering of 150,000 people on 20 April, Abdullah said that in
1947 he had challenged Pakistans authority to annex Kashmir on
grounds of religion, and now he was challenging the Indian contention that the question had been settled. A solution must be
found agreeable to both India and Pakistan with due regard to the
sentiments of the people of Kashmir. In late April Abdullah traveled to Delhi for talks with Nehru (who died soon after, on 27 May
1964), and in May he went to Pakistan for talks with Pakistans
military dictator, Ayub Khan. Beg and Masoodi accompanied him
on both missions.37
The brief season of hope in Kashmir faded within months. The
government of India was alarmed by Abdullahs tough stance
on self-rule and by his insistence on the need for Pakistans involvement in nding a serious, durable resolution to the Kashmir

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question. Sadiq was threatened by the overwhelming popular response, at least in the Valley heartland, to Abdullahs politics.
Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed was smarting from his imposed
marginalization, and still had the loyalty of a large number of
deputies in the IJK Legislative Assembly elected in 1962. By the autumn a tactical alliance between Bakshi and Abdullah appeared
in the ofng, on the basis of their shared aim of bringing down
the Sadiq government. In September 1964 pro-Bakshi deputies in
the Assembly moved to organize a no-condence motion against
Sadiq, with Abdullahs tacit support. Sadiqs government reacted
by arresting Bakshi (and six of his leading supporters) under a draconian law, the Defence of India Rules, inherited from the British
colonial era. Bakshi was charged with endangering national security and sent to the same prison in Jammu where Abdullah had
been incarcerated eleven years earlier. Although he was released
within a few months on health grounds, the confrontation split
the ruling group as a core of Bakshi loyalists continued to challenge Sadiqs authority.
Under attack on two fronts in Srinagar, Sadiq looked to New
Delhi for salvation. As in 1953, the leaders of Indias government
sensed an opportunity in the internecine struggles of the
Kashmiri Muslim elite. In December 1964 Indias interior minister announced in parliament that the Union government had decided to bring IJK under the purview of two of the most centralist
(and controversial) provisions of the Indian constitutionArticles
356 and 357, which respectively empower the center to dismiss
elected governments of Indias states in the event of a breakdown
of law and order and to assume their legislative mandate. A constitutional order to that effect was immediately promulgated from
New Delhi. In March 1965 central powers of intervention and control were further strengthened when the IJK Assembly passed

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a constitutional amendment that abolished the post of Sadr-eRiyasat (titular head of state in IJK), elected by members of the
IJK legislature, and replaced it with a governor (the standard term
used in all Indian states) appointed by New Delhi. Other amendments passed at the same time changed the title of IJKs prime
minister to chief minister (as in all Indian states), and provided
for direct election from IJK to the popularly elected chamber of
Indias Parliament, the Lok Sabha (House of the People)previously, representatives to Indias Parliament had been nominated
by IJKs legislature.
This slew of imposed integrative measures, operationalized
through the cooperation of a clique of client IJK politicians, was
preceded by the most breathtaking development of all. On 3
January 1965 the working committee of the National Conference
(meaning its ruling Sadiq faction, Mir Qasim being party general
secretary) announced that the NC would dissolve itself and merge
into Indias ruling Congress party. In other words, the name and
identity of Kashmirs historic political movement would cease to
exist altogether, and the NC would be absorbed into Indias Congress as a provincial branch. It is difcult to conceive of a more
drastic centralizing strategy than what unfolded between December 1964 and March 1965. On 10 January the Congress partys
working committee unanimously accepted the merger offer.
This was effectively the end of the road for Article 370 and IJKs
autonomous regime. Indeed, the Hindu nationalist agenda for
IJK, articulated by the Praja Parishad in Jammu and by Hindu nationalist parties in India since the late 1940s, had emerged victorious in IJK by 1965. The irony is that the foundation for this victory had been systematically laid by the policies of the 19471964
government of Jawaharlal Nehru, the apparent personication of
Indias liberal secularism, and only carried to conclusion by his

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successors. Perhaps Nehru was inuenced by his own Kashmiri

Pandit origins, or, even more plausibly, was trying to compensate
for his role in the partition of India. But it is incontrovertible that
Nehru, undoubtedly the greatest outside inuence on Kashmirs
political history, was, in the words of Balraj Puri, above all a nationalist. He subordinated democracy, morality and sub-national
aspirations [to autonomy] to the claims of Indian nationalism.38
The people of the Valley reacted with unprecedented anger,
and their protests were again suppressed with brute force and
large-scale arrests. In mid-January 1965 Abdullah delivered a vitriolic speech in front of a huge PF gathering at the Hazratbal
shrine, calling on the people to resist imposition of Articles 356
and 357 and the absurd and insulting attempt to eradicate the identity of Kashmirs premier regionalist movement. Violence and arson took place in some parts of Srinagar city as massive crowds
returned from the meeting, and by 7 March the situation became
sufciently explosive to warrant a large-scale arrest of leaders of
the Plebiscite Front. (Abdullah himself was rearrested under Defence of India Rules after returning from a trip to foreign countries in May.) Sporadic unrest continued, however, and the disturbed situation in IJK probably encouraged Pakistans military
regime to seize the moment to foment an uprising in IJK, which
led to war between India and Pakistan in the autumn of 1965.39
In fact, it was no secret that Pakistan had been training young
men for three years [since 1962, when the defeat by China exposed Indias military vulnerability] at different military camps
to ght as guerrillas in the mountainous recesses and foothills
of Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir. But in contrast to 1989
1990, when an insurrection aided from across the LOC but
spearheaded by Valley Kashmiris would erupt in IJK, the several
thousand armed men who crossed the CFL into IJK in August

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1965 consisted of either Pakistani nationals [mostly professional

soldiers] or others [volunteers] who belonged to non-Kashmirispeaking AJK territories. They had taken for granted the fullest
cooperation of the local Muslims but this was not forthcoming,
at any rate not on the expected huge scale. The ambitious operation failed, although anti-government student demonstrations
broke out again in Srinagar in October 1965, after the two countries had reached a truce, and Chief Minister Sadiq narrowly escaped assassination while visiting Baramulla.40
Shortly after the end of the 1965 war, the Kashmiri Pandit
writer and activist Prem Nath Bazaz wrote that for a clear understanding and realistic appraisal of the Kashmir situation it is necessary to recognize the fact that by and large State [IJK] Muslims
are not very friendly towards India. An overwhelming majority
of them are not happy under the present political set-up, and desire to be done with it. But they are reluctant to bring about
change through warfare and bloodshed. It would take another
quarter-century of repression and a generational turnover for the
pacist approach to yield decisively to armed struggle, qualifying Kashmiris as an exemplar of the political scientist Donald
Horowitzs category of reluctant secessionists.41
In 1966 Jayaprakash Narayan, an Indian opposition leader,
wrote to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Nehrus daughter: We
profess democracy, but rule by force in Kashmir. We profess secularism, but let Hindu nationalism stampede us into establishing it
by repression. Kashmir has distorted Indias image in the world as
nothing else has done. The problem exists not because Pakistan
wants to grab Kashmir, but because there is deep and widespread
discontent among the people. Bazaz argued at the time that
while India may reject the plebiscite and turn down UN resolutions as outdated and impractical, India cannot forever defraud

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the State [IJK] people of their constitutional right to free elections. He added that if free elections are held, it may be taken
for granted that the majority of seats will be captured by those
unfriendly to India.42
This was precisely the scenario New Delhi was anxious to avoid
at all costs. In 1967 elections to constitute a new Assembly, 39 of
the 75 seats were lled without a contest. Congress candidates
meaning those sponsored by the SadiqMir Qasim faction of the
NCwere returned unopposed in 22 of the Valleys 42 constituencies. From the southern Valley town of Anantnag, the ofcial
candidate Khwaja Shamsuddin, who had served as IJKs prime
minister for a few months in 19621963, was elected unopposed
after papers led by ve other candidates were rejected as invalid.
In all, nomination papers of 118 candidates were rejected, 55 of
them on the grounds that the candidates had failed to take the
obligatory oath of allegiance to India. The government party won
60 of 75 seats in the legislature.
For the rst time, simultaneous elections were held to ll 6
seats from IJK in Indias Parliament (the Lok Sabha). For 2 of
theseLadakh and the Valley seat of AnantnagCongress candidates were elected unopposed. Another 3 were won by Congress candidates, as Jammu-based Indian opposition groups like
the Praja Socialist Party and the [Hindu nationalist] Jan Sangh
severely criticized electoral irregularities. The irregularities common to both sets of polls included large-scale rejection of nomination papers, arrests of [opposition] polling agents, advance distribution of ballot papers to Congress workers, absence of
opposition agents at time of counting, and rampant use of ofcial
machinery to the advantage of the ruling party. Thus Congress,
which [previously] had no base [in IJK] . . . bagged ve of the six
parliamentary seats.43

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There were only a couple of interesting footnotes to this fruitless exercise. A young PF leader, Ali Mohammed Naik, made
a tactical decision to swear allegiance to India, got his papers
approved, and was returned to the Assembly as an independent
from his hometown, Tral, in the southern part of the Valley.
Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, who had been prime minister from
1953 to 1963, ran against the Congress candidate for Parliament
from Srinagar as a candidate of the rump National Conference.
Puri recalls being told at the time in Srinagar by ofcials deputed
from Delhi to supervise the election that Bakshi had to be defeated in the national interest. It has been plausibly argued that
Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed would probably not have won a free
election at any point during his ten years in ofce. In 1967, holding aloft the banner of Kashmiri regionalist resistance to New
Delhi and Congress, he was elected to Indias Parliament from
Srinagar.44
In December 1970 the PF, in a shift of strategy, announced that
it would contest elections to Indias Parliament due in 1971 and to
IJKs Legislative Assembly due in 1972. Syed Mir Qasim, Sadiqs
successor as IJKs Congress chief minister, panicked. In his memoirs, published in 1992, Qasim wrote that at the popular level the
PF had, since its emergence in the mid-1950s, reduced the [ofcial] National Conference to a non-entity in Kashmirs politics.
If the elections were free and fair, he added, the victory of the
Front was a foregone conclusion.45
It seems Qasims assessment was correct. In early 1968 Sheikh
Abdullah, imprisoned under Defence of India Rules since May
1965, was briey released before being incarcerated again. The
Times of India reported that almost the entire population of
Srinagar turned out to greet him as he arrived back in the Valley
in March 1968, adding that the crowds of hundreds of thousands

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were chanting Sher--Kashmir Zindabad [Long Live the Lion of

Kashmir], Our Demand Plebiscite. Days later, addressing a hundred thousand supporters in Anantnag, Abdullah warned that repression will never suppress the Kashmiri peoples urge to be free
and asked India to redeem her promise to allow the people of
the State to exercise their right to self-determination. Visiting the
city of Jammu on 23 December 1970, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared that attempts to enter the IJK Assembly or the Indian
Parliament with the intent of wrecking the constitution would
not be tolerated. When asked by journalists how such subversion
would be prevented, she answered: Ways will be found.46
On 8 January 1971 externment orders were served on the top
PF leaders Mirza Afzal Beg and G. M. Shah (Abdullahs son-inlaw), obliging them to leave IJK territory. On the night of 89 January, across IJK, at least 350 ofcials and members of the Front
were arrested under the [IJK] Preventive Detention Act in a series
of police raids. On 12 January the government of India declared
the PF an unlawful organization under Indias Unlawful Activities
(Prevention) Act, on the grounds that the Front had on diverse
occasions by words, either spoken or written, and signs and visual representations . . . asserted a claim to determine whether or
not Jammu and Kashmir will remain a part of India.47 In subsequent elections in 19711972, Congress won ve of six parliamentary districts and fty-seven of seventy-ve Assembly districts.
The Jamaat-i-Islami, a pro-Pakistan conservative religious group,
got ve deputies in the Assembly, apparently after an understanding with the Mir Qasim regime that it would help oppose the PFs
pro-independence politics. In the parliamentary election, Bakshi
Ghulam Mohammed stood for reelection from Srinagara
sprawling, congested capital city where outright rigging of an
election is more difcult than in rural areasthis time as a re-

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gime-backed Congress candidate, consistent with his chameleon

record. He was defeated by Shamim Ahmed Shamim, a PF sympathizer standing as an independent, by a large margin of 57,000
votes.
In 1975 Sheikh Abdullah nally abandoned his self-determination platform. In return for Abdullahs release and appointment
as IJKs chief minister, his ever-faithful associate, Mirza Afzal Beg,
signed another Delhi accord with the government of India
whose terms verged on capitulation to New Delhi and Indira Gandhi. The agreement reafrmed, virtually without modication,
the terms of IJKs incorporation into India since 1953. A patently
hypocritical clause stated that Jammu and Kashmir, a constituent
unit of the Union of India, shall continue to be governed under
Article 370. In reality, between 1954 and the mid-1970s, 28 constitutional orders integrating IJK with India had been issued from
Delhi, and 262 Union laws had been made applicable in IJK. The
Delhi accord gave IJKs government the right to review only
those laws from the shared center-state concurrent list of powers which had been extended to IJK after 1953, and to decide
which of them might need amendment or repeal. A committee
was set up to examine the matter, but its recommendations were
never made public. This aside, the Delhi accord patronizingly conrmed IJKs right to legislate on welfare measures, cultural matters, social security, and [Muslim] personal law.48
This was not a settlement Abdullah would have acceptedor
even consideredtwenty, ten, or even ve years earlier. His politics and popularity since 1953 had been based on deance of New
Delhis authoritarianism. In 1995 I interviewed Abdul Qayyum
Zargar, an NC veteran who had been Afzal Begs personal secretary in 1975, in his hometown of Doda, a town in the Jammu region populated mainly by Kashmiri-speaking Muslims. Recalling

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the 1975 accord, Zargar said that its terms were deeply unpopular
among NC-PFs activists and mass following, and swallowed as a
bitter pill only because Abdullah had accepted the accord. Possibly
Abdullah was worn down by agehe turned seventy in 1975and
two decades of incarceration. He probably also calculated that
after Pakistans defeat and dismemberment in the December 1971
Bangladesh war, the regional balance of power had swung
decisively in Indias favor, leaving him with little alternative to
accepting terms dictated by New Delhi. Not everyone agreed or
acquiesceda young Valley-based activist, Shabbir Ahmad Shah,
formed an organization called the Peoples League in the mid1970s to keep the quest for self-determination alive, and paid for it
by spending most of the next twenty years in Indian jails. Nonetheless, in an amusing contrast to 1965, Mir Qasim stepped aside as
chief minister to make way for Abdullah, who was then elected
leader of the house by the Congress group that was overwhelmingly dominant in the IJK legislature constituted in 1972.
The Delhi-determined circumstances of an emasculated
Abdullahs return to ofce amounted to a clever evasion of the
Kashmir conict rather than a substantive solution to it. However,
his return, and the revival of the Plebiscite Front as the National
Conference under his leadership, helped foster a semblance of
competitive politics in IJK for the rst time since 1947. In 1977 Congress withdrew its support for Abdullah and elections were held
to constitute a new Legislative Assembly. Abdullahs NC captured
a clear majority47 of 76 seatsin the legislature. Signicantly, it
swept the Kashmir Valley, winning 40 of 42 seats from the region
(Congress was wiped out in the Valley, where the other two seats
went to the Janata Party, an anti-Congress coalition which had
ousted Indira Gandhis party from power at the center earlier in
1977). The Congress and the Janata Party won 11 seats each in

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the Jammu region, where the NC came in a respectable third with

7 seats. Thanks to the participation of the pro-Abdullah bloc
clearly the most popular force in IJKs politics, with overwhelming
dominance in the Valleythe 1977 election was a great improvement on the farcical elections between 1951 and 1972. The relative
opening up of political space and election of a reasonably representative government contributed to a degree of stability.
But by the late 1970s the Lion of Kashmir was in the twilight of
his life, and fundamentally he was a defeated man. He died in
1982, a year after he anointed his elder son, Farooq Abdullah, a political novice, as his successorin keeping with the subcontinents
destructive tradition of combining democratic and dynastic politics.49 Farooq took over as chief minister, and in mid-1983 led the
NC into another Assembly election. This election was ercely
contested with Indira Gandhis Congress, which had returned to
power in Delhi in 1980 after the Janata coalition elected to govern
the country in 1977 disintegrated into feuding factions. By mid1983 Indias next parliamentary elections, due by late 1984, were
on the horizon and Indira Gandhi was rehearsing a strategy of
majoritarian mobilizationbased on thinly veiled appeals to Indias Hindu majority to unite for the countrys national unity and
integrity against alleged secessionist threats from Muslim and
Sikh minoritiesto ensure her return to power.50 Gandhi decided
to use the IJK elections as a laboratory for her strategy, and
evoked a signicant response among Hindus in the Jammu region,
where Congress won 23 of 32 seats at stake. But Congress won
only 2 seats in the Valley, where NC again triumphed, winning 38
of 42 seats. NC also picked up 8 seats from the Jammu region and
1 in Ladakh, returning, as in 1977, a total of 47 members to the 76seat legislature. Congress emerged as a large opposition with 26
legislators (23 from Jammu, 2 from Kashmir Valley, and 1 from
Ladakh).

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But Indira Gandhi, an instinctive autocrat, would not accept

the verdict gracefully, and IJKs Congress would not play the role
of a constructive opposition. Gandhi was especially angry because Farooq Abdullah had, shortly before the Assembly elections,
aligned the NC with Indian opposition parties trying to re-create a
united anti-Congress front on Indias national political scene in
preparation for parliamentary elections in late 1984. From the
viewpoint of integrating IJKs political life with the Indian Union,
Farooqs developing relationship with opposition parties in India
was unequivocally a welcome development, because the emergence of Farooq as more than a regional [IJK] gure, even if antiCongress, automatically implied deeper political integration of
Kashmir with the Union.51 But in building this relationship
Farooq was breaking a tacit understanding in the 1975 Delhi accord that had enabled his fathers release and return to ofce,
whereby the NC would support Congress rule at the center in
exchange for Congress governments toleration of NCs primacy
in IJK.
In all-India parliamentary elections in 1977 and 1980, NC and
Congress had contested as de facto allies in IJK, sharing out its 6
seats in Parliament between themselves. In June 1984, as Farooqs
government approached the end of its rst year in ofce, a sordid
scheme, apparently engineered by the Congress government in
New Delhi, saw twelve of NCs forty-seven legislators quit their
party, form a new group, and form a new government with the
support of the sizeable Congress caucus in the Assembly. The
leader of the defectors was G. M. Shah, Sheikh Abdullahs son-inlaw and a one-time general secretary of the PF, who had nursed
ambitions that he, rather than the political amateur Farooq,
would inherit the sheikhs mantle. All twelve turncoats, mainly
NC back-benchers, were rewarded with ministerships in the new
government.

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According to Farooq Abdullah, the entire plan was hatched

in 1 Safdarjang Road, New Delhi (then the prime ministers ofcial residence), and directed by Mrs Gandhi.52 Its chief executor in Srinagar was a man called Jagmohan, IJKs New Delhiappointed governor, who had assumed the post three months earlier
after the previous governor apparently refused to collude in conspiracies. It was a tragic replay of the 1953 putsch, with Farooq,
G. M. Shah, Jagmohan, and Indira Gandhi playing the roles of
Sheikh Abdullah, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, Karan Singh, and
Jawaharlal Nehru. Jagmohan dismissed Farooq, denied him an opportunity to try to prove his majority on the oor of the house,
and rejected his appeal for fresh elections. As in 1953, protests
erupted in Srinagar and throughout the Valley. These were suppressed with the aid of detachments of the Central Reserve Police
Force (CRPF), paramilitary police under the Union interior ministrys control, which were own to Srinagar from Delhi the night
before the coup.
The tentative opening to political pluralism and representative
government in IJK that had begun in 1977 was closed off in 1984
and never restored. G. M. Shahs main distinction in ofce was to
earn the sobriquet curfew chief ministerfor seventy-two of
the rst ninety days of his administration the Valley was under
curfew orders to prevent protest demonstrations. His reign, which
lasted until March 1986, brought political vacuum and institutional paralysis. The public mood was sullen. In December 1984
Indias parliamentary election was held. Congress, led by Indira
Gandhis fresh-faced son Rajiv, won a massive victory throughout
the country, riding on a sympathy wave after Indira Gandhi was
assassinated by two Sikh members of her own bodyguard on 31
October 1984. But all three Lok Sabha constituencies in the Kashmir Valley returned NC candidates with huge majorities. Con-

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gress won the two seats from the Jammu region and one from
Ladakh, but overall the deposed NC polled 46 percent of the IJKwide vote, as opposed to only 30 percent for Congress.53 In March
1986 violence against minority Pandits broke out in one area in
the southern part of the Valley, around a town called Bijbehara,
the home of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, IJKs top Congress leader.
G. M. Shahs lame-duck government was then dismissed by the
centers Congress government on the basis of Article 356 (citing a
breakdown of law and order), and Governor Jagmohan became
the effective ruler of IJK. The political and institutional void was
complete.
In late 1986 Farooq Abdullah concluded a rapprochement with
the Congress regime at the center. Under its terms, he was reinstalled as chief minister pending fresh Assembly elections in
March 1987, which he undertook to contest in alliance with the
Congress party (under the arrangement, NC contested 45 of 76
seats, mainly in the Valley, and Congress the other 31, mainly in
the Jammu region). Farooq said that he had come to accept a
hard political reality: If I want to implement programmes to
ght poverty, and run a government, I will have to stay on the
right side of the center.54 Farooq had decided to accept that IJKs
right to a modicum of representative government (and economic
development) was conditional on the whims and agenda of allpowerful New Delhi authorities, but the NCs mass following did
not agree. In fact, they had had enough. A decade earlier, in 1975,
they had only reluctantly accepted the imposition of the Delhi accord, and only because their supreme leader, the legendary Sheikh
Abdullah, had signed on to it. His son did not have the stature and
clout to achieve a repetition of 1975. To the contrary, Farooqs decision, seen as cowardly capitulation, evoked hostility and contempt. A new generation of young men, born in the 1960s, took

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the lead in the election campaign of the Muslim United Front

(MUF) coalition, formed as an independent, pro-people organization to ght NCs opportunistic alliance with the detested Congress at the polls.
What happened in the elections of March 1987 was recounted
at the beginning of this chapter. The process and its outcome irrevocably tainted Farooq Abdullah and his supporters in the eyes of
their former voters as just another clique, serving as tools of the
Indian state in return for the spoils of political ofce. This was the
moment when the Valley and some of its contiguous areas lost all
residual condence in Indias political system. Media and ofcials
in India rejoiced in the victory of forces of democracy and secularism and vilied the MUF as Pakistan-inspired fundamentalists
arguing for a theocratic state.55 Qazi Nissar, a prominent religious preacher in the Valley and a top MUF leader, had this to say
in the aftermath of the election: I believe in the Indian Constitution. How long can people like us keep getting votes by exploiting
Islam? We wanted to prove we can do something concrete. But
this kind of thing makes people lose all faith in India. (Nissar was
assassinated in his Anantnag home by pro-Pakistan militants in
June 1994.) Abdul Ghani Lone, another MUF leader who saw his
resounding victory in Handwara turn to dust amid large-scale arrests of his supporters, queried in despair: If people are not allowed to vote, where will their venom go but into expressions of
anti-national sentiment? (Lone, who started his political career in
the Congress party in the 1960s and 1970s, was assassinated in
Srinagar, also by suspected pro-Pakistan militants, in May 2002.) A
shocked Srinagar lawyer who had voted for the MUF had only this
to say: I dont even pray regularly. But if you take my vote away, I
lose all faith in Indian democracy.56 The sense of disenfranchisement was absolute, but what happened in 1987 was also absolutely
consistent with IJKs fate since 1947 in democratic India.

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Farooq Abdullahs second term in ofceuntil January 1990,

when his government was dismissed (he says he resigned rst)
and IJK brought under Delhis direct rule after the eruption of an
anti-India uprisingwas a disaster. His behavior during his curtailed rst term, in 19831984, has been described as that of a little boy with a toy (he was given to joyriding motorcycles around
Srinagar); and during the second as a virtual abdication of governance.57 He acquired the sobriquet disco chief minister because he was frequently sighted in discotheques in Indian cities,
and he spent much of the rest of his time playing golf or vacationing abroad. His colleagues in government earned a reputation for
corrupt practice remarkable even by IJK standards.
Meanwhile, the situation beyond the portals of ofcialdom
turned steadily grim. In 1988 a new phenomenon emerged in IJK:
increasing numbers of young men went mysteriously missing
from their homes in towns and villages across the Kashmir Valley.
They had gone across (the LOC), in search of weapons and
combat training. In June 1988 public demonstrations in Srinagar
against a steep hike in electricity rates were suppressed by police,
who opened re and killed several unarmed protesters. Then, on
31 July, bombs exploded outside Srinagars central telegraph ofce
and at the Srinagar Club, a gathering place for the political establishment. The attacks were carried out by Srinagar youth freshly
returned from across the LOC, but were planned by Mohammad
Rauf Kashmiri, a JKLF militant from Pakistani Poonch who had
inltrated into IJK.58 In September 1988 the JKLF had its rst
shaheed (martyr): Aijaz Dar, a young Srinagar man, was shot dead
during a botched attempt to assassinate a senior police ofcer.
Strikes and black days were observed throughout the Valley on
15 August 1988 (Indias independence day in 1947), 26 January 1989
(Indias republic day in 1950), and 11 February 1989 (the day in
1984 the JKLF co-founder Mohammad Maqbool Butt was hanged

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by Indira Gandhis regime for killing a policeman during a bank

robbery in 1976), and in April 1989, when the elderly father of the
self-determination activist Shabbir Shah died in police custody.
The rhetoric of IJKs democratic and secular chief minister
turned increasingly bellicose. Sheikh Abdullahs son declared that
his regime had the backing of the Indian government and that
he was prepared to raze particularly rebellious districts of his capital, break strikes by forcing shops to open, and break the legs of
protesters before burying them alive.59
In August 1989 Mohammad Yusuf Halwai, a senior NC ofcial
who had been prominent in rigging the elections in March 1987
and in the subsequent repression, was shot dead by masked men
in broad daylight in the heart of a congested Srinagar neighborhood. The assassination sent a wave of fear through the local hierarchy. In November, in another ominous signal, a retired Pandit
judge who had sentenced Maqbool Butt to death a decade earlier
was killed in the northern Valley town of Sopore. In the last few
months of 1989, in a typical pre-insurrectionary pattern, a spate of
targeted killings occurred in the Valley, directed especially against
known or suspected agents and informers of the extensive Indian
intelligence-gathering apparatus. In late November 1989 another
Indian parliamentary election was held in IJK, with the underground JKLF and other pro-self-determination groups like Shabbir
Shahs Pakistan-oriented Peoples League calling on voters to boycott the polls. The NC won unopposed in Srinagar, while in the
other two Valley constituencies, Baramulla and Anantnag, its candidates were elected with 94 and 98 percent, respectively, of votes
cast. The turnout of voters in the Valley was only 4 percent, according to ofcial sources, and even this was apparently achieved
by security forces stufng ballot boxes at pre-selected sites (turnout was also low, 38 percent, in Udhampur, one of the Jammu

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regions two parliamentary districts, which has a substantial

Kashmiri-speaking Muslim electorate). At no time since 1947, not
even at the height of the Plebiscite Fronts popularity in the 1960s,
had the estrangement of a large proportion of IJKs population
from India been so apparent. The Kashmir conict was about to
enter a new phase.

In The Federalist Papers (no. 10), James Madison wrote: Liberty

is to faction what air is to re, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty,
which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction,
than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential
to animal life, because it imparts to re its destructive agency. According to contemporary democratic theory: What distinguishes
democratic rulers from non-democratic ones are the norms that
condition how the former came to power and the practices that
hold them accountable for their actions. Democracy may give rise
to a considerable variety of institutions and subtypes. For democracy to thrive, however, specic procedural norms must be followed and civic rights respected. Any polity that fails to follow the
rule of law with regard to its own procedures should not be considered democratic. These procedures alone do not dene democracy, but their presence is indispensable to its persistence.60
The political history of IJK clearly does not fulll even the procedural minima of democratic governance. With the partial exception of 19471953 and 19771984, New Delhi elites have ruled
the territory through a combination of direct control and intrusive intervention, and through sponsorship of intermediary IJK
governments unrepresentative of and hence unaccountable to the
population. This policy appears to have been motivated by fear of

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Pakistani designs, and by suspicion and mistrust of the loyalties

and preferences of most of IJKs population. The strategy has had
the effect of severely retarding democratic institutional development and rights of franchise, participation, and representation in
IJK. This, aggravated by systematic elimination of IJKs autonomous regimecoercive integration effected via compliance of
client IJK governmentshas in time turned Indian elites fear of
separatism into a tragically self-fullling prophecy.
Two points that emerge from my argument need emphasis.
First, the intolerance, indeed criminalization, of political opposition in IJK has been especially destructive to the relationship between Kashmir and India. It is indisputable that a functioning political opposition is essential to any democracy . . . Democratic
systems rely on institutionalized oppositions, and it is doubtful
any regime can long survive as minimally democratic without
them. This is because peaceful turnover of power following elections is a sine qua non of democratic politics, which in turn requires both the permissive freedoms of speech and association,
and the presence of institutions and practices that make it possible for counter-elites to organize, so as to be able to contest for
power. The existence of outlets for dissent within the regimes
institutions is thus critical to the stability of a democratic polity,
for otherwise frustrated dissent may become radicalized and assume an anti-systemic form.61
The political scientist Juan Linz has advanced a threefold
typology of political oppositions to regimes: loyal, semi-loyal, and
disloyal.62 Given the international dispute concerning rightful sovereignty over J&K, and the existence of a powerful urge to selfrule (plus pro-Pakistan factions) within IJK, perhaps the best India
could have hoped for in IJK would have been oppositions semiloyal to Indias polity. For example, the MUF of 1987 included

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pro-independence and pro-Pakistan groups but was committed

to participation in Indian-sponsored institutions and political processes. Similarly, IJKs Jamaat-i-Islami, which is ideologically proPakistan, nonetheless contested Legislative Assembly elections in
1972, 1977, and 1983, as well as under the MUF umbrella in 1987.
But the cynical authoritarianism of Indian policy fostered progressive radicalization and emergence of disloyal opposition that rejected the entire political framework as hopelessly corrupt, denounced Indian authority over IJK as illegitimate, and launched
a campaign to overthrow it. That was how the Jamaat-i-Islami
political worker and would-be legislator Yusuf Shah metamorphosed into the Hizb-ul Mujahideen commander Syed Salahuddin
and the MUF campaign volunteer Yasin Malik was transformed
into a leader of JKLFs armed struggle for independence. But they
should not have been entirely surprised by their experience. The
hiatus between the Indian states democratic, federal principles
and its authoritarian, centralist practices in IJK has been evident
since the inception of the Kashmir question.
That brings me to the second point I wish to clarify. Why did
uprising and insurrection erupt only in, and remain conned to,
the Indian side of the Line of Control in Kashmir? After all, the
political history of Pakistans Azad Jammu and Kashmir is not
exactly a celebration of freedom and democratic rights either. The
senior pro-independence leader in AJK, Amanullah Khan, has conceded that the area has prospered in the last twenty years . . . due
to the fact that over a million [AJK] people are working in the
Middle East, Europe and the USA. However, he has pointed out
that although the people of AJK have regular elections, have their
own elected president, prime minister, supreme court, high court,
election commission, legislative assembly and public service commission, there are continuing restrictions on political rights and

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participation. Specically: You have to declare in writing that you

favor accession to Pakistan. If you dont you are not allowed to
contest elections. In 2001, JKLF elded its candidates for 31 of 36
seats in the Azad Kashmir assembly but all its nominations were
rejected because its candidates stood for complete independence.
About 300 JKLF activists were arrested and released only after the
elections. Indeed, AJKs constitution stipulates that no person or
political party in Azad Jammu and Kashmir shall be permitted to
propagate against, or take part in activities prejudicial or detrimental to, the ideology of the States [J&Ks] accession to Pakistan. Moreover, the institutional development Khan refers to is
relatively recentfrom 1948 until the early 1970s, Pakistans Ministry of Kashmir Affairs probably had the best claim to being head
of the Azad Kashmir government.63
Several explanations are possible for why discontent translated
into uprising and insurrection only in Indian Kashmir, not in Pakistani Kashmir. They include the smaller size and population of
AJK, the relative historic strength of pro-Pakistan allegiances
among AJKs population, and the possibility that Muslims would
be reluctant to take up arms against a Muslim state (but recall
Bangladeshs revolt against west Pakistans oppressive military regime in 1971). In my view, however, the bitter radicalization of opposition to India among a large proportion of IJKs population is
better explained by a different factor. Pakistan has been for most
of its history, and remains, a military-bureaucratic state which
has oscillated between ruler and moderator versions of praetorianism, and proven unable to stabilize basic democratic institutions and procedures.64 India, by comparison, is a moderately successful democracy which has built and sustained such institutions
and procedures, despite the challenges posed by poverty and enormous social diversity. The people of IJK had high expectations of

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such a system. It was thus particularly galling for them to be

denied the civil liberties, democratic rights of participation and
representation, and federal autonomy that by and large were respected, with imperfections, in the Indian Union. In other words,
Indian policy reduced IJK to an anomalous enclave of authoritarian politics and repressive central control within an institutional
framework based on robust multi-party politics and federalism.
IJKs Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists may have been unhappy with
this situation, but they would not take up armed struggle (with
Pakistani support) because their ultimate allegiance, and identity,
lies rmly with India. But for most of the Muslim populationespecially in the long-suffering ValleyIndias democracy had been
exposed as a cruel hoax by the end of 1989. Their rage spilled over
in early 1990.

THE WAR IN KASHMIR

If I did not write, my heart would explode like a bomb.

s h a k e e l s h a n,
poet from the Kashmir Valley

Ashfaq majid wani and Nadeem Khatib grew

up as best friends in Srinagar during the 1970s and early 1980s.
Both boys were born in 1967 into prosperous, professionally successful upper-middle-class families and attended the citys best
grammar school. Both were bright students and ne athletes.
Ashfaqs ambition was to be a doctor, while Nadeem aimed to become an airline pilot.
During his teens, Ashfaq began to develop political convictions.
In early 1987 he volunteered, like thousands of youngsters across
the Valley, in the Muslim United Fronts election campaign. On
23 March 1987 he was one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of
opposition activists arrested in police crackdowns across Indiancontrolled Jammu and Kashmir (IJK) to prevent organized pro-

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tests as Farooq Abdullahs National Conference (NC) returned to

power in Srinagar with Congress and New Delhis support. He
was released nine months later. He had been kept in solitary connement for part of that time, charged with a minor offense allegedly committed on 4 April, on which date he had been in police
custody. When released he had cigarette burns all over his body,
sustained during interrogation.
Ashfaq left home and disappeared shortly after being released. He never came home again. But during 1989 he emerged
as a household name across his homeland as one of the HAJY
groupso-known after the rst names of its four members,
Hamid Sheikh, Ashfaq Wani, Javed Mir, and Yasin Malikthe nucleus of young Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front ( JKLF) militants freshly returned to Srinagar with weapons and training from
across the Line of Control (LOC). By early 1990, as government
authority collapsed in the Kashmir Valley and insurrection took
hold, Ashfaq Wani was one of the most wanted men for Indias
beleaguered security forces. On 30 March 1990 they nally tracked
him down in one of the many congested residential neighborhoods that make up the old city of Srinagar. In the rst major
blow suffered by the JKLF in the war for azaadi (freedom), Ashfaq
Majid Wani was killed, at the age of twenty-three, in a erce exchange of re.
I disagreed with my son and turned him out of the house,
Ashfaqs father told an Indian newspaper a month later. But he
found a much larger family.1 In early April 1990 the largest gathering ever seen in Kashmir, easily surpassing even Sheikh Abdullahs
funeral in 1982, took place in Srinagar. It was for Ashfaqs funeral,
attended by some ve hundred thousand mourners who deed
Indian curfew orders. Ashfaqs is still an honored name in Kashmir. He is buried in Srinagars central martyrs cemetery, situ-

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ated in the old citys Eidgah district, alongside two thousand other
shaheed (martyrs) who have fallen as mujahideen (holy warriors) in
the struggle for azaadi. Ashfaqs grave is anked by those of two
other JKLF pioneersHamid Sheikh, who was gunned down in
Srinagar by the Indian army in November 1992, and Maqbool
Butt, who was hanged in Delhis Tihar Jail in February 1984 for
killing a policeman during a bank robbery in 1976. Butt was one of
very few Valley youths of the previous generation who embraced
the gunhe went across the LOC in the mid-1960s from his village in IJKs Kupwara district, close to the LOC, and joined the
JKLF, then newly established in Pakistani-controlled Azad
Jammu and Kashmir (AJK). Butts grave in the Eidgah cemetery is
actually empty, since Indian authorities, fearing unrest, did not return his body to his homeland. The green Urdu inscription on his
tombstone says that the people of Kashmir are in intezaar (eternal
waiting) for his return.
Ashfaq Wanis ghting death inspired thousands of other young
Kashmiri men to take up arms to continue the struggle. But his
friend Nadeem Khatib was not among them. He never even
talked of joining the militants, says his father, Inayatullah Khatib.
Instead, Nadeem pursued his career goal of becoming a pilot.
He left Srinagar to rst join a ying school near Delhi in March
1992, then went to the United States and obtained his commercial pilots license after training at a ying school in the southern
state of Georgia. In January 1994 he joined the same school as an
instructor. He returned to battle-scarred Srinagar in November
1994 and stayed for almost two years. He even got engaged to a
cousin, although his parents discerned that he was not keen on
marriage. In October 1996 he left, telling his parents he was going
back to the United States to nd employment as a pilot with an

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American airline. During the next two years his parents received
regular telephone calls from their sonfrom the United States,
they assumed.
Nadeem Khatib died in 1999, at the age of thirty-two, during a
erce encounter (reght) between his guerrilla unit and Indian
forces in a remote mountainous area of IJKs Jammu region. Apparently, he had soon left the United States for Pakistan. A close
friend says: He used to brood a lot on Americas exploitation of
Muslim countries. He would say that after being in the US for
years, his eyes had opened. He had then traveled to AJK and enrolled as a member of Al-Badr, an Islamist group waging insurgency in IJK. After combat training, this son of Srinagars social
elite inltrated across the LOC to ght as an ordinary foot soldier
in the jehad against Indian forces in his homeland. After his death,
two undated letters he had written during his time as a guerrilla
ghter reached his parents and brother. I am going at the call of
Allah and doing what Allah has made our farz [duty], Nadeem
had written. I am aware this might hurt, but duty to Allah comes
rst . . . Dearest Mom and Dad, it is because of the way you raised
me that my Iman [faith] is so strong . . . It is important to remember that life on this earth is nothing more than a test and sowing
ground, and that the life to come is the eternal life. In retrospect,
his family reected that during Nadeems time in Srinagar in the
mid-1990s, as a weakened but still potent war for azaadi raged
around them, exacting a daily toll of lives and suffering, they had
sensed something brewing inside him . . . perhaps some sort of
dilemma. He nally sought his answer in faith. And when he did,
he left everything. Nadeems parents are as proud as Ashfaqs of
the choice their son eventually made. I have no regrets, says his
mother, Mahjabeen. I have absolute faith my son died a martyrs

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death and is therefore alive. Whenever I am alone, I feel his presence. When I stand up on the prayer mat, I feel him next to me.
He was always his mothers boy.2

The deaths of Ashfaq Wani and Nadeem Khatib, a decade apart,

provide key insights into the evolution of the struggle for azaadi
in Kashmir. Ashfaq died as a soldier of the JKLF, which launched
the armed campaign and dominated the azaadi movement for
its rst three years, 19901992. The JKLF found spiritual inspiration in the Kashmir Valleys specic Islamic traditions, rooted in
the mystical piety of its Su saints. Its revolt was essentially the
expression of a repressed regional patriotism. Its declared ideology was (and is) an independent Jammu and Kashmir separate
from both India and Pakistan, encompassing the 1947 princely
states borders, and it insists that its outlook towards non-Muslims
is nonsectarian. But the JKLFs armed struggle withered a decade
ago. The group Khatib joined, Al-Badr, is one of several Islamist
insurgent groups, organizationally centered in Pakistan, which
have kept the ght going in IJK since the mid-1990s alongside
the only surviving guerrilla organization composed primarily of
locals, the pro-Pakistan Hizb-ul Mujahideen (HM). The groups
dominated by non-locals, who are frequently alumni of fundamentalist madrasas (religious seminaries) in Pakistan, are led by
Pakistani religious zealots such as Haz Muhammad Sayeed of
Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Maulana Masood Azhar of Jaish-eMohammad ( JeM), and their motivation is of a radical Islamic
character. Ashfaq Wani died in 1990, during the heady euphoria of
the rst months of the uprising, and in Srinagar, unquestionably
then the epicenter of the revolt. By the time Khatib joined the insurgency in the late 1990s, Srinagar, although far from normal,

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had ceased to be a city dominated by huge pro-azaadi processions

and hundreds if not thousands of boys openly aunting weapons on the streets. The locus of insurgency had moved out to rural, often remote forested areas of the Valley, and had spread to
new theaters, principally Muslim-dominated mountainous tracts
of the Jammu region such as the twin districts of Rajouri and
Poonch on the LOC. It was in one such zonea remote mountainous area called Mahore in Jammus Udhampur districtthat
Nadeem Khatib fell while playing his part in a protracted war of
attrition with the Indian state. Unlike Wanis, his was a largely
unsung death. By 1999 hundreds of martyrs graveyards dotted
towns and villages across the Valley and some parts of the Jammu
region, and Khatibs is just another among thousands of shaheed
tombstones.

The Intifada Phase (19901995)

In keeping with the history of most protracted struggles between
state power and popular insurrection, the azaadi movement has
had a tortuous trajectory and traversed several distinct phases.
In this account of the war in Kashmir, I distinguish three such
phases: the intifada or uprising phase, which lasted from 1990 until
1995; a period of demoralization and atrophy (19961998); and the
dayeen phase (19992002), marked by the renewal of insurgency
with a radical Islamist ideological color and the ascendancy of Pakistan-based militant groups using dayeen (suicide-squad) tactics
against Indian forces.
In January 1990 the simmering rebellion of 19881989 (described
in Chapter 2) came to a boil in mass resistance to Indian rule
in the Kashmir Valley. The JKLFs campaign of selective assassinations of alleged Indian spies and political collaborators in the
Valley escalated sharply in the nal months of 1989, starting with

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the shooting of a prominent NC functionary, a Muslim, on a

Srinagar street in August 1989. Over the next six months more
than one hundred such killings occurred, effectively paralyzing
the governments administrative machinery and severely damaging its surveillance and intelligence apparatus. Approximately
three-fourths of the victimsa mix of ofcials of the local political hierarchy, alleged spies and intelligence agents, and prominent citizens accused of pro-India leaningswere Muslims, and
the rest were Pandits, members of the Valleys small but highprole Hindu minority.3 By December 1989 a total boycott of Indias late-November parliamentary elections had taken place in
the Valley, and the decisive moment had arrived. In early December, the daughter of the Kashmiri Muslim interior affairs minister in Indias federal cabinet, a medical student in Srinagar, was
kidnapped by JKLF activists. Her captors demanded the release of
six top JKLF activists then in jail. When the militants were freed,
they were greeted by thousands of Srinagar residents amid scenes
of jubilant celebration (the JKLF released the young woman, unharmed). In January 1990 the incapacitated IJK government of
Farooq Abdullah was dismissed by the federal government, citing Article 356 of the Indian constitutiona breakdown of civil
orderand IJK was brought under New Delhis direct rule.
Jagmohan, who as New Delhiappointed IJK governor had played
a murky if not nefarious role in IJK between 1984 and 1986
(see Chapter 2), was sent back to Srinagarthis time by an antiCongress coalition government which had ousted Rajiv Gandhis
Congress from power in New Delhito confront an explosive
situation.
In the second half of January, massive demonstrations calling
for Kashmirs azaadi from India erupted in Srinagar and other
towns in the Valley. Even the JKLFs still relatively few under-

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ground militants were initially stunned by the spectacular scale

and emotional intensity of the protests. Hundreds of thousands
marched in the streets of Srinagar; even in smaller towns like
Sopore, Baramulla, and Anantnag tens of thousands participated.
Squads of stone-throwing youths confronted heavily armed personnel of the federal governments Central Reserve Police Force
(CRPF) and Border Security Force (BSF) in every Srinagar neighborhood, prompting comparisons to the rst Palestinian intifada,
which began in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza in December 1987. The local Jammu and Kashmir police seemed to
have disappeared from the Valley practically overnight. The CRPF
and BSF unitsknown as paramilitary forces because their
structure, organization, weaponry, and role place them in the gray
area between ordinary police and the professional militaryconsisted almost entirely of non-Muslim Indians from outside IJK.
By 1990 some of their personnel had acquired combat experience against long-running guerrilla insurgencies in Indias volatile
northeastern borderlands (adjoining Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and China) as well as in Punjab province, the site of a secessionist revolt by some Sikhs in the 1980s and early 1990s. But the
challenge they encountered in the Valleyan entire society in the
throes of uprisingsimultaneously unnerved and enraged them.
During just three days of mass protests, 2123 January 1990,
some three hundred excited but unarmed demonstrators were
shot dead in Srinagar by these paramilitary troopers. A Srinagar
resident, Farooq Wani, employed as an engineer in a department
of the IJK government, narrated his experience of one such demonstration, which took place on 21 January 1990:
I fell down on the road [after being hit by gunre]. I saw
small boys being shot. I remained lying. Then I saw a

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paramilitary ofcer coming. I saw him pumping bullets

into the bodies of injured people lying on the road. A
young boy trying to hide under the bridge [over the
Jhelum River] was killed . . . As I lifted my head, a
CRPF man shouted: Hes still alive! I pleaded: Im a
government employee, please dont shoot. The ofcer
shouted abuses at me and said Islam mangta hai?
[you want Islam?], and red at me. My back and hands
were hit. Another paramilitary moved up to me and
shoutedtum sala zinda hai, mara nahin hai? [you
bastard, you havent died yet?] He left after kicking my
back . . . Then a truck was brought, and all of us, dead
and injured, were piled into itthey loaded about 3035
dead bodies. As there was no space for more, the ofcer
ordered the driver: Baaki ko naale mein phenk do [throw
the rest into the stream]. A tarpaulin was thrown over
us. After driving for some time we stopped, and I heard
voices speaking Kashmiri. One of the injured among us
cried out. The tarpaulin was lifted and we saw a local
policeman, who said: My God, there are living bodies
here. Three other people were still alive.

Wani survived with six bullet wounds to various parts of his body.
He later heard that the policeman who saved his life had suffered a
heart attack.4
Mirajuddin Munshi, a well-known Srinagar physician, had been
an intellectual mentor to the JKLFs youthful leaders from 1988
on. I rst met him in the United States in 1994, after he left Kashmir fearing assassination by pro-Pakistan radicals, following a rash
of murders of pro-independence members of the Valley intelligentsia during 19921993. In our conversation, Dr. Munshi recalled

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the horror he had felt as an eyewitness to the indiscriminate killing of hundreds of unarmed Srinagar protesters in the rst weeks
of the uprising. Dr. Munshi had no illusions about the nature of
Indias relationship with Kashmirhe would otherwise not have
become a JKLF ideologuebut the brutality of the Indian state
still came as a profound, bitter shock. In 1990 it reinforced his belief that the time had come to part ways with India.
International events played a signicant role in steeling insurrectionist resolve in late 1989 and early 1990. The rst Palestinian intifada against Israeli occupation was an important reference
point, as was the collapse of repressive one-party regimes in central and eastern Europe after mass demonstrations in the autumn
of 1989. In the words of a Srinagar academic, We felt that if the
Berlin wall could be dismantled, so could the Line of Control.5
The young Kashmiri guerrillas, for their part, were inspired by the
1989 Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in the face of Afghan
mujahideen resistance, and by the success of Tamil Tiger guerrillas
in Sri Lanka in stalemating a vastly superior Indian military force
sent to suppress them between 1987 and 1990.
In retrospect, it is clear that these were dangerously nave analogies. Soviet forces would withdraw from Afghanistan, as Indian
forces would from Sri Lanka, once it became clear that these foreign expeditions were fundamentally misguided and increasingly
costly in terms of resources and combat casualties. The Indian
state would not contemplate any such course in Kashmir, the cornerstone of its identity as an inclusive, secular state and the focal
point of its bitter enmity with Pakistan. The Indian states response to the uprising was instead to institute a policy of ruthless
mailed-st repression, a policy supported by virtually the entire
spectrum of Indian political opinion. On 24 January 1990 JKLF
gunmen responded to the Srinagar massacres by killing four un-

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armed Indian air force ofcers on the outskirts of the city. Thereafter, the Valley was caught up in an escalating spiral of violence
and reprisal.
As shown in Chapter 2, state-sponsored violations of civil liberties and fundamental democratic rights of citizens had been normal, indeed institutionalized practice in Indian Jammu and Kashmir for four decades prior to 1990. But what unfolded in IJK from
1990 on was of a different order and magnitudea massive human rights crisis. From the perspective of Indian counterinsurgency strategy, a surgical response was not feasible given the
manifestly popular nature of the uprising. Indeed, an Indian journalist reported in April 1990 that the azaadi movement had united
workers, engineers, schoolteachers, shopkeepers, doctors, lawyers, even former MLAs [members of the IJK legislative assembly]
and Jammu and Kashmir police.6 The nonsurgical response rapidly turned the relationship between the Indian state and the Valleys population into an occupier-occupied relationship, sealing a
bitter divide. Between July and September 1990 the Valley was
brought under the purview of martial law, as the Indian government enacted an Armed Forces Special Powers Act and a Disturbed Areas Act to back up existing IJK emergency regulations
and its own draconian law, the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities
(Prevention) Act.
But most Indian counterinsurgency operations in the Valley
made no reference to any framework of law. The BSF, the CRPF,
and other specialized paramilitary formations such as the Indo-Tibetan Border Police took over policing of the Valleys cities, including Srinagar, while in the countryside and border areas close
to the LOC absolute power passed into the hands of the regular
Indian army. In the eyes of the several hundred thousand soldiers
and paramilitary troops ooding the Valley, the whole population

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was suspectnot just disloyal to India but, much worse, in league

with the enemy state across the LOC. A correspondent of an Indian newspaper reported from Srinagar in April 1990 that for the
average Indian soldier ghting insurrection in the Valley, the face
of the Kashmiri has dissolved into a blurred, featureless mask. He
has become a secessionist-terrorist-fundamentalist traitor. Even
afuence and inuence are no longer safeguards, the correspondent wrote, against the policy of blanket repression.7
In August 1990 an article in an Indian magazine described a
trade union activist in the Valleys northwestern Kupwara district,
who had participated in numerous labor agitations in India. When
he tried to tell those torturing him in a local army camp about his
Indian friends, they retorted: Humme sab kuch pata hai. Tum sab
pakistani ho (We know everything. You are all Pakistanis).8 In the
summer of 1995 I spoke with Afzal Hussain, a schoolteacher in the
village of Drugmulla, just off the road running from the town of
Baramulla to Uri, a town on the LOC in the northwestern part of
the Valley. Hussain said he had been arrested by the army in a
general crackdown in May 1990, in which all able-bodied men in
the area were indiscriminately picked up. He said he had been tortured with electric shocks and red-hot iron rods in three different
army camps in Baramulla district over the next forty days. You
know, he told me with a wry smile, I did my masters degree in
philosophy from an Indian university. As a realist and a secularist, I
was quite comfortable with Kashmir being part of the Indian
Union.
Crackdowns wereand indeed still arethe main instrument used by Indian forces in the war against insurgency. The
term denotes operations in which large detachments of gun-toting troops arrive in convoys of jeeps and trucks, cordon off an urban neighborhood or a village, and require all men to come out of

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their homes and gather in an open space, such as a schoolyard.

Masked mukhbirs (informers)often suspects captured in earlier
operations and softened up through interrogationwould then
be set to work identifying militants (the term for guerrillas) and
those civilians especially active in helping and harboring them. In
the meantime, soldiers would conduct house-to-house searches
looking for weapons, explosives, and hidden insurgents. Allegations of theft of money and valuables, vandalism, and molestation
of women and girls during these intrusive searches rapidly became commonplace. In response to such accusations, the authorities sometimes also required women and girls to gather outside,
in a group separate from the men. Some crackdowns would last a
whole day or longer, even in harsh winter conditions.
Those identied as suspects would then be driven away to army
or paramilitary camps, or to special interrogation centers which
sprouted in Srinagar and across the Valley. Torture, often in gruesome forms, became routine and widespread. According to an
American journalist who covered the Valley in 19901991, in interviews ofcers of the security forces stated that the use of torture was absolutely vital to obtain information on weapons
caches, hideouts and insurgent groups memberships, and the
whereabouts of the leaders. Numerous people returned from interrogation either physically crippled or mentally disturbed, or
both; others never returned at all. In August 2002 a major IJK
newspaper estimated that since 1990, 3,500 persons had disappeared after being taken into custody; in early 1999 Amnesty International estimated the gure at over 800.9
Srinagar and other towns were frequently placed under curfew
orders, sometimes lasting weeks, to prevent the recurrence of
mass demonstrations. Even so, huge azaadi rallies took place, for
example in March 1990 when over three hundred thousand peo-

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ple gathered in the town of Charar-e-Sharief, thirty kilometers

from Srinagar, at the shrine and mausoleum of the Valleys patron saint, the fourteenth-century Su mystic Sheikh Nooruddin
Noorani, and took a collective oath, in the presence of JKLF
leaders, to struggle for self-determination. Another massacre of
about sixty pro-azaadi marchers took place in Srinagar in May
1990. Such incidents continued to occur as late as October 1993,
when thirty-seven participants in a pro-independence demonstration in Bijbehara, in the southern part of the Valley, were killed
by BSF personnel. Between 1990 and 1993 the central market
squares of one town after anotherSrinagar, Sopore, Bijbehara,
and Handwara in the Valley, Doda in the Jammu regionwere either gutted or severely damaged by security forces running amok
after guerrilla raids targeting their personnel. Numerous civilians
were killed during these rampages. In April 1993, for example,
Srinagars famous Lal Chowk (Red Square, so-named in 1947 in
honor of the Moscow original by NC leftists) was partially gutted
by BSF soldiers. Sixteen civilians were killed during the incident.
In February 1991 members of an army unit are alleged to have
raped dozens of women in a mountain village, Kunan Poshpora,
in the Valleys Kupwara district. One woman, who was in late
pregnancy at the time, was also kicked in the stomach and subsequently gave birth to an infant with a fractured arm. A decade
later, in 2002, incidents of egregious sexual violence by Indian soldiers against Kashmiri women continued to be reported.10
When I toured the Valley and the Doda-Kishtwar district of
Jammu in 1995, the entire region resembled an armed garrison,
teeming with soldiers, and a vast prison camp for the population.
Roadblocks were ubiquitous in both towns and rural areas, and
verbal abuse as well as beatings of citizens was common at these
checkpoints. Srinagar had become a bunker city, adorned with

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hundreds if not thousands of bunkers manned by paramilitary

soldiers crouching behind sandbags and wire netting (the latter
as protection against grenade attacks), their guns peering out
through ring slits. Soldiers ngering their triggers were stationed
ten yards apart on all major roads, and groups of soldiers constantly patrolled neighborhoods on foot or in special patrol vehicles. The same regime was in place in other towns. Srinagar
turned into a ghost city, its streets monopolized by heavily armed
soldiers, as soon as dusk fell. On roads connecting the Valleys
towns, military convoys traveled at all hours, the lead vehicle
sporting a mounted machine gun. Even remote villages existed
cheek-by-jowl with Indian military encampments.11
This regime of repression had the effects of further radicalizing
public opinion and of convincing thousands of Kashmiri youths
to take up arms to ght the Indian state. The years 19901993 were
the boom period of armed struggle in the Valley, a time of immense turmoil and suffering but also of great enthusiasm and optimism about the mass movement. During my eld research in IJK
in the mid-1990s, I repeatedly heard how during 19901992 droves
of young men, determined to avenge humiliations, abuse, and
brutality endured at the hands of the Indian state, would leave
their homes in cities and villages and either undertake the hazardous LOC crossing or seek training and arms in militant camps established in the Valley. In January 1990 Indian security ofcials
were already speaking of a deant new breed of Kashmiri. In
early May 1991, at the start of the summer inltration season,
seventy-two young men from the Valley were killed by Indian
troops on the LOC on a single day while attempting to return
from AJK to join the ght. Visiting the Valley in 1992, an Indian
journalist found that children no longer dream of becoming doctors or engineers; their ambition is to become mujahids, and that

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repression had succeeded in eliminating militants in arithmetical

progression and generating militants in geometrical progression.
The Valley was rife with Indian troops, but they were unable to
gain the upper hand over exponentially multiplying guerrillas fervently supported by almost the entire population.12
Two features of the azaadi movement during this ascendant
phase merit emphasis. First, the insurgent groups ghting Indian
forces consisted overwhelmingly of local Kashmiri recruits, in
sharp contrast to 1947 and 1965, when principally non-IJK elementsPakistani nationals and volunteers from AJKhad taken
on the Indians. For example, of 844 guerrillas killed in ghting
during 1991, only two were not residents of IJK, according to
ofcial gures of the Indian counterinsurgency command in
Srinagar.13 Indias Kashmir problem had nally come home to
roost. The internal conict was now at least as critical as the international dimension. The independentist JKLF had been formed
in Pakistani Kashmir in the mid-1960s, and for more than twenty
years had had a negligible presence on the Indian side of the LOC,
since the pro-independence political space was solidly occupied by
the National Conference/Plebiscite Front of Sheikh Abdullah vintage. In the transformed political context of 19891990, however,
a new, radicalized generation in the Kashmir Valley, ying the
JKLFs banner of independent Kashmir, emerged as the vanguard
of a mass uprising.
Second, the insurgency was initially very largely specic to the
Valleya geographically and culturally compact region with a
powerful tradition of autonomist politics developed over fty
years, expressed rst by the historic National Conference movement and then by the Plebiscite Front. In 1990 it was essentially
the old NC-PF brand of politics that, radicalized under the leadership of a militant younger generation, rebelled against India. The

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impact of the uprising was at rst minor in the Jammu region

(and in thinly populated Ladakh, where it has remained so). In the
early 1990s the guerrilla movement made its rst inroads into
Jammu in the Doda district, a huge, mountainous expanse covering the northeastern part of the Jammu region. The vast area
and rugged, forbidding terrain, through which the Chenab river
runs a meandering course, make it an ideal base for guerrilla
ghters, and the district is contiguous to the southern Valley district of Anantnag. But demographic and political factors, rather
than merely topography and geography, made Doda district into
one of the toughest zones of the guerrilla war by 1992. The districts population is at least 57 percent Muslim (1981 census) and
most of these are Kashmiri speakers, ethnolinguistically identical
to the dominant Valley population, making Dodas Muslim society substantially a sociocultural and political extension of the Valley. Signicantly, Indian-controlled Jammus two other Muslimmajority districts, Rajouri and Poonch, whose Muslims belong
predominantly to non-Kashmiri ethnolinguistic communities such
as Gujjars and Rajputs, remained quiet in the intifada phase of the
war, even though both districts adjoin the volatile LOCtheir
turn would come several years later, in the dayeen phase.
Ethnolinguistic community with a religious base, rather than
an overarching pan-Muslim identity, was clearly the decisive factor
in the 19901995 phase of the azaadi movement. Dodas Kashmirispeaking Muslim enclaves embraced the Valleys cry of self-determination with enthusiasm. In July 1992 the bustling market of
Doda town (which is 80 percent Kashmiri Muslim) was razed by
the CRPF in retaliation for a militant raid. As in the Valley, experience of repression drove the resistance. In the summer of 1995 I
interviewed Maulana Farooq Hussain Kitchloo, the middle-aged
imam (head preacher) of the mosque in Kishtwar, a picturesque

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mountain town (52 percent Kashmiri-speaking Muslim, 48 percent

Hindu and Sikh) located in the most disturbed part of Doda district. He told me of a dening moment in the towns history: in
March 1995, when his nephew Marouf Ahmed Hub, a twenty-twoyear old shopkeeper, was arrested by the towns BSF commandant
and tortured to death in custody. Twenty thousand people from
the town and surrounding villages demonstrated for azaadi the
next day, and guerrilla recruitment and activity picked up signicantly in Kishtwar tehsil of Doda district.
Years later, at the time of writing in the autumn of 2002, DodaKishtwar remains one of the most difcult areas of operation for
Indian counterinsurgency forces (the locally recruited guerrillas
of Hizb-ul Mujahideen, HM, have proven especially resilient) and
a simmering cauldron of communal tension because of the mix
of religious groups in its population. In November 2001, for example, thirteen soldiers were killed when their convoy was ambushed at Ramban, a Doda township on the highway connecting
Jammu city to Srinagar through the Banihal pass. In August 2002
an army colonel commanding counterinsurgency operations died
in a mine blast in the interior of Doda district (after which security forces burned four nearby Muslim villages). Both attacks were
attributed to HM units active in the area, and Shakeel Ansari,
HMs commander for Doda and adjoining mountainous parts of
Udhampur district, is one of most wanted guerrilla leaders in
IJK.14
The spread of insurrection throughout Kashmiri-speaking areas
of IJK obscured emerging problems in the azaadi campaign. The
rst of these was the exodus from the Valley of the bulk of the regions main religious minority, the Kashmiri Pandits, shortly after
the uprising began. According to the government of Indias 1981
census, Hindus made up only 4 percent124,078 of 3,135,000 peo-

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pleof the Valleys population. The vast majority of these were

Kashmiri Pandits, so the Valleys Pandit population was probably
130,000140,000 in 19891990 (numerous Kashmiri Pandits already
lived permanently outside Kashmir, in various Indian cities, where
many achieved prominence in various professions, the civil service, and the military). As the uprising broke out across the Valley
in early 1990, approximately one hundred thousand Pandits left
their Valley homes for Jammu city and Delhi in a few weeks in
February and March, in one of the most controversial episodes of
the war in Kashmir. Organized groups representing Pandit migrants have since claimed that they were forced out of the Valley
by a systematic terror campaign of ethnic cleansing and even
genocide. Pro-azaadi Muslim opinion in the Valley tends to argue that the migration was encouraged and even actively facilitated by Indian ofcials, particularly Governor Jagmohan, in a deliberate attempt to stigmatize the azaadi movement as sectarian
and fundamentalist.
While it is not possible to resolve such conicting versions conclusively, the facts of the matter appear to lie somewhere between
the two poles. The JKLFs campaign of selective assassinations
claimed some Pandit lives between September 1989 and February
1990, although Muslim victims numbered three times as many.
High-prole Pandit victims included the president of the Kashmir
Valley unit of Indias Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) in September 1989, the retired judge who a decade previously had sentenced the JKLF cofounder Maqbool Butt to death
in November 1989, and the director of the Srinagar station of Indias government-run television network in February 1990. These
highly publicized killings may well have contributed to the spread
of fear in the Pandit community. Some of the agents of Indian intelligence agencies targeted by JKLF assassins were also Pandits,

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who, to the resentment of some local Muslims, have a history of

being overrepresented relative to their proportion of the population in government employment in IJK. The sight of huge proazaadi demonstrations chanting Islamic religious slogans across
the Valley in JanuaryFebruary 1990 may have further intimidated
local Pandits and contributed to their exodus. On 15 March 1990,
by which date the Pandit exodus was substantially complete, the
All-India Kashmiri Pandit Conference, a community organization,
asserted that a total of thirty-two Pandits had been killed by Muslim militants since the previous autumna plausible claim.15 The
displacement of Pandits from the Valley has been the prime tool
of Indian ofcials, politicians, and media in the propaganda war
over Kashmir since 1990.
But the Pandit issue is more complex and ambiguous than that
propaganda suggests. In 1995 I visited squalid camps housing
poorer Pandit refugees in Purkho and Misriwala, settlements near
the city of Jammu in IJKs Hindu-majority south, and was touched
by their condition. These were rural folk uprooted from their
farms and orchards in the Valley; lacking the professional qualications and connections of the urbanized majority among
the Valleys Pandits, they were having a difcult time. They uniformly narrated horror stories of intimidation and violence that
had forced their departure, and portrayed the Valleys Muslim majority as crazed fanatics. However, when I continued my journey
to the Valley, I met a number of Pandits, in some cases entire families, living in the Valleys towns and villages. Their narratives
were markedly different. These were representatives of the sizeable minority among the Pandits who had not joined the 1990 exodus, and there were also a few who had left in 1990 but returned in
the intervening years. They spoke, in private interviews, of being
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and friends. Several expressed sympathy and solidarity with the

Valleys majority population living under Indian repression, although all were unequivocal in their opposition to armed militancy against the Indian state and to the politics of azaadi.16
Indeed, a young Pandit visiting his parents in Srinagar in the
summer of 1992, for the rst time since the insurrection began,
wrote: Our mohalla [neighborhood] had not changed except for
two CRPF bunkers on the street. I was amazed at the friendliness and warmth with which I was greeted. Muslim neighbors
turned up with mithai [sweets] and blessed me as soon as word
got out that I was in town and invited me to their houses to celebrate with sevion-ki-kheer [vermicelli pudding, a traditional delicacy]. There was not a single Muslim friend or acquaintance who
did not greet me as he would have before the troubles began.17
When a pre-dawn crackdown took place in their mohalla during
his stay, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh neighbors were united in their
resentment against the security forces conducting the operation.
Even more dramatic testimony is available from a prominent
Pandit couple kidnapped in Srinagar in November 1991 by members of an armed group calling itself Hizbullah, who were released after forty-ve days in captivity:
During this time we lived for varying periods in 57
[Muslim] homes. All those people showered love and
hospitality on us. We owe them all a debt of gratitude.
With their sympathy we were better able to cope . . .
We met a cross-section of people in the villages and a
sizeable number of youth belonging to militant organizations. We talked with them about education, religion,
social life, politics, Kashmiriyat [the meaning and values
of Kashmiri identity], human emotions, and above all,

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ways of building bridges and winning hearts. These

interactions reinforced our faith in the values of love
and goodness which are still deeply ingrained in the
Kashmiri ethos.18

In response to persistent allegations by Indian media and rightwing Hindu politicians about desecration and destruction of
scores of Hindu temples and shrines in the Kashmir Valley, a leading Indian magazine undertook an investigation in February
1993.19 Its journalists were armed with a list of twenty-three such
sites supplied by the Delhi ofce of the BJPwhose top leader
L. K. Advani (Indias interior minister post-1998 and deputy prime
minister since 2002) said after Hindu extremists demolished the
disputed Babri mosque in the north Indian town of Ayodhya in
December 1992: Nobody raised a voice when over forty temples
were desecrated in Kashmir. Why these double-standards? The
investigators, who inspected and photographed each site, found
that twenty-one of the twenty-three shrines were completely intact (the other two had sustained minor damage in unrest after
the razing of the Babri mosque). They reported that even in villages in which only one or two Pandit families are left since the
exodus of 1990, the temples are safe . . . even in villages full of
[armed] militants. The Pandit families have become custodians of
the temples. They are encouraged by their Muslim neighbors to
regularly offer prayers.20 This is consistent with a syncretistic feature of Valley society, in which shrines and saints are often revered
by people cutting across formal religious boundaries.
In the recent, dayeen phase of the insurgency, Pandits living in
the Valley have been occasionally targeted, including one massacre near Srinagar in which twenty-three villagers were killed. At
the same time, some Pandits have steadily trickled back to live in

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Srinagar since the mid-1990s, and many more have resumed visits
to the Valley from Delhi or Jammu. In mid-2002, for example, fteen thousand Pandits, mostly migrants, participated in an annual
festival held at one of the most famous Hindu shrines, Khir
Bhawani in the village of Tulmulla, near Srinagar, where local
Muslims welcomed them with open arms. In April 2002, twentyve hundred Pandits living in the Valley, including a large number
of women and children, organized a major Hindu religious ceremony in the heart of Srinagar.21 Nonetheless, the azaadi movement has never been able to live down the taint of the Pandit exodus in the rst months of the uprising. The embarrassment has
been especially acute for JKLF, the organization that pioneered the
insurrection and dominated its rst three years, since its struggle
was (and is) supposedly motivated by a vision of an independent
Jammu and Kashmir in which all religious faiths, ethnicities, and
regions can coexist with dignity and equality. However, most of
Kashmirs Pandit minority became the rst collateral casualties of
the independence war, and the movements leaders cannot avoid a
measure of moral if not actual culpability for their fate. The
Pandit ight also exposed a critical aw embedded in the independent Kashmir conceptits complete inability to accommodate the multiple political allegiances regarding sovereignty and
citizenship that exist even in the Kashmir Valley (the stronghold
of pro-independence sentiment) and even more extensively in IJK
as a whole (see Chapter 4). The Pandits, whose history, culture,
ethnicity, and language are the same as the Valleys Muslims, suffered because as a community ultimately loyal to India they could
not identify with the patriotic anti-India uprising sweeping their
home region.
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alarming proliferation of armed groups in the Valley. In the rst

heady years, with revolution in the air and the Valley awash in
weapons procured from across the LOCfrom shadowy sources
in AJK or Pakistan proper or in the booming arms bazaars of the
North-West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistanit was distinctly fashionable to become a freedom ghter. It was almost
equally easy for newly minted commanders to gather a band
of gunmen from their locality or extended family and oat a
tanzeem, a guerrilla group. The Valleys history of endemic political factionalism also played a role in this. For example, two factions of the Peoples League, a pro-Pakistan political party formed
in the 1970s, spawned two separate tanzeems: Muslim Jaanbaaz
Force and Jehad Force, which were only uneasily amalgamated
as Al-Jehad. Young adherents of the Peoples Conference party in
the Valleys northern Kupwara district formed their own guerrilla
outt, Al-Barq. In Srinagar, elements of the Islamic Students
League, an organization active in the 1980s, emerged in 1990 as a
group called the Allah Tigers, whose main activities appeared to
be making statements to the press emphasizing the mujahideen
ban on alcohol, cinema, and beauty salons and issuing puritanical
strictures on the dress and behavior of women. The group disappeared after 1990.
But the fragmentation of the armed struggle was only partly
a spontaneous process generated by factionalism and the heat of
the moment. The Pakistani militarys Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI) had, during the 1980s military regime of General Zia-ul Haq,
acquired vast resources and autonomy as the nodal agency coordinating the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)sponsored war
against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. By 1989 Soviet
forces were on their way out of Afghanistan and the ISI was in a
position to focus on the new war in Kashmir, Pakistans sacred na-

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tional cause since 1947. In an unexpected windfall for the ISI, sizeable numbers of youth from Indian Kashmir were, for the rst
time since 1947, prepared to take up arms against Indian rule. Between 1988 and 1990 ISI operatives assisted the JKLF, which saw
Pakistan as a vital strategic ally, in launching the insurrection. Like
the JKLF vanguard, they were initially taken aback by the explosion of anti-India feeling in the Valley. As the armed revolt rapidly
acquired a popular character owing to the severe and indiscriminate nature of Indian repression during 1990, thousands of Valley
youths started to cross the LOC in search of weapons and training. The Kashmir jehad was on.
The ISI sensed that a long-awaited window of opportunity for
Pakistan had nally opened in Kashmir. However, the JKLF, the
agent and vehicle of the uprising, was dogmatically committed to
the ideology of an independent, reunited Jammu and Kashmir
state, separate from both India and Pakistanan ideology elaborated as early as 1970 by the movements veteran ideologue
Amanullah Khan.22 From 1991 the ISI cut off aid to the JKLF and
adopted a twin-track strategy to mold the Valley uprising to Pakistans conception and interests.
The rst strategy aimed to divide and weaken the JKLF by
encouraging its pliable elements to break away and form proPakistan guerrilla groups. By 1991 at least two such factions had
emergedAl-Umar Mujahideen and Ikhwan-ul Muslimeen (literally, Muslim Brothers). Al-Umar was led by Mushtaq Ahmed
Zargar, alias Latram, a Srinagar JKLF militant who had become
notorious for executing suspected collaborators by exploding grenades tied to their bodies.23 In late 1993 I interviewed an Ikhwan-ul
Muslimeen commander, a Srinagar resident who said that after
basic training in Pakistan the ISI had sent him to acquire practical
training in war by participating in the 1991 Afghan mujahideen

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siege of Khost, a city in eastern Afghanistan whose fall heralded

the countdown to the end of the pro-communist Najibullah regime in Kabul in 1992.
The second strategy was to build up a pro-Pakistan guerrilla organization operating in the Valley, the Hizb-ul Mujahideen (HM),
as a force that could rival and then displace the JKLF. HM, a guerrilla group with close links to the IJK branch of a conservative Islamic party, the Jamaat-i-Islami ( JI), which also has organizations
in Pakistan and Bangladesh, was chosen to be the Pakistani states
surrogate in IJK. In 1991 the leader of HM in the Valley, Ahsan
Dar, a native of the town of Pattan in Baramulla district, was
purged as insufciently reliable and replaced by the veteran JI activist Yusuf Shah, alias Salahuddin (whose antecedents are described in Chapter 2). Abdul Majid Dar, a native of the town of
Sopore in the northern Valley, an area where JI has inuence, became the key HM operational commander in the Valley.24 By 1993
the ISI had further diversied its Kashmir portfolio by encouraging zealot Islamic groups based in Pakistan, such as Harkat-ul
Ansar, to enter the Kashmir war. In 1994 Maulana Masood Azhar,
a top Harkat-ul Ansar activist from Bahawalpur, in the southern region of Pakistans Punjab province, was captured by Indian
forces in the southern Valley district of Anantnag.25

By 1994, in addition to crackdown, blast, and ring, a new

term had entered the vocabulary of war in Kashmir: gun culture. It carried a pejorative meaning. The mujahideens halo of
heroism was gradually giving way to a painful realization among
the public that because of the phenomenal expansion of the
armed struggle from 19901993, the ranks of freedom ghters contained politically shallow people, opportunists, and even criminals.

Copyright 2003 The President and Fellows of Harvard College

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By mid-1994 it was being reported from the Valley that Kashmiris

are sick of growing criminal tendencies among proliferating
armed groups.26 But public disenchantment with the climate of
insecurity created by roaming groups of gunmen was outweighed
by an even bigger problem facing the azaadi movement.
As the dominant guerrilla organization, the JKLF bore the
brunt of repression imposed by the Indian counterinsurgency machine between 1990 and 1992. Of 2,213 guerrillas killed in that
three-year period, the majority were JKLF ghters, including the
cream of its ghting cadres, and hundreds more were captured. In
1993 another 1,310 guerrilla ghters were killed; in 1994 the guerrilla death toll was 1,596. In 19921993 reports emerged that Indian
counterinsurgency authorities were operating a catch-and-kill
policy in the Valley, under which guerrilla suspects were being
summarily executed.27 One civilian ofcial responded to the allegations by saying, Yes, theyre killing them. Perhaps because the
jails are fullor they want to frighten the people, while a paramilitary commander asserted in April 1993: We dont have custodial deaths here, we have alley deaths. If we have word of a militant, we will pick him up, take him to the next lane, and kill
him.28 In 1992 members of the local Jammu and Kashmir police
staged a revolt in Srinagar after one of their members was tortured to death. Of the JKLFs original four-man HAJY group,
Ashfaq Wani died on 30 March 1990, and Yasin Malik was captured in a wounded condition on 6 August 1990 and not released until May 1994. Hamid Sheikh was also captured; released
in the autumn of 1992 by BSF intelligence to counteract the rising
inuence of pro-Pakistan elements in the guerrilla struggle, he
was killed along with several associates by Indian army intelligence, which apparently did not agree with the BSFs decision, in
Srinagar in November 1992.29 By 1992 the JKLFs dominance of the

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armed struggle was under siege on three fronts: relentless pressure from the Indian security forces, the formation of splinter
groups with Pakistani support, and the rapidly rising strength,
again with Pakistani support, of HM as a military force.
The rst known armed clash between JKLF and HM guerrillas
occurred in Srinagar in April 1991, and a JKLF area commander
was killed. Further clashes, and casualties on both sides, occurred
during 1991 and 1992, more the result of local turf wars than of
ideological disagreement. Attempts to patch up differences in the
broader interest of the movement were not successful. In February 1992 the JKLF temporarily retrieved its position when the
JKLF organization in AJK attempted a highly publicized march
on the LOC to stress the unity in struggle of the two Kashmirs.
Pakistani and AJK authorities dismissed the independentists move
as a political stunt and reckless provocation to Indian armed forces
positioned at the LOC. Some thirty thousand people joined the
JKLFs march, which was broken up by Pakistani border troops
who opened re just short of the LOC, killing twenty-one marchers. When news of the killing of Kashmir independentists by Pakistani forces reached Srinagar, 60,000 people gathered at the
Hazratbal shrine, taken over by JKLF militants since 1990, defying [Indian] curfew, to condemn the Pakistani action and express
solidarity with the independence movement. The episode was described as a major [political] victory for JKLF groups operating in
the Valley over Pakistan-sponsored factions like HM.30
But besieged on three fronts, its best cadres dead or jailed, the
JKLF was ghting a losing battle. The year 1993 marked the decisive ascendancy of HM as the dominant guerrilla group in the
armed struggle. In May 1993 Javed Mir, the sole member of the
HAJY group still active in the eld, admitted as much when he
said, Gun-power is not the only thing that matters. The public

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are the most powerful weapon and they are on our side.31 In mid1994 Yasin Malik, freed after four years in prison, declared an
indenite JKLF ceasere, partly to preserve what remained of the
JKLFs cadre. He was not particularly successful in that goal. In
January 1995 Malik told me that since mid-1994 he had lost almost
a hundred activists to continuing Indian operations against the
group. A veteran IJK journalist has told me that in his estimation
a total of three hundred surviving JKLF members were killed
by Indian counterinsurgency forces after the groups unilateral
ceasere in mid-1994, often after HM members provided information regarding their identity and whereabouts, thus completing
the decimation of JKLFs eld presence.32 The JKLFs ceasere decision did not discernibly reduce violence in IJK, since the group
was already a marginal player in insurgency by that time. The
middle of 1994 was nonetheless a political turning point in the
azaadi movement, as the pioneer militant organization effectively
laid down its arms.
Javed Mirs brave claim was both right and wrong. Bereft of
gun power in a heavily militarized environment, the spokesmen
of the independence movement would struggle to retain political
relevance from 1994 on. However, he was right about the limitations of gun power. In 19931994 HM emerged as the leading guerrilla organization in the eld, but its ideology of Kashmir banega
Pakistan (Kashmir will become Pakistan) remained a minority orientation, at odds with the continuing popular appeal of independentist ideology in the pro-azaadi areas of IJK. HMs sacrices in
the cause of azaadi were (and are) widely admired, but its political
afliate JIs brand of orthodox Islampreached in a network of
religious schools run by the partyis regarded with distaste by
most Muslims in the Valley and other Kashmiri-speaking areas

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like Jammus Doda-Kishtwar, who prefer their more liberal, eclectic Su-inuenced version.
In 1995 a senior JI activist in Kupwaras Nowgam sector, dominated by HM militants, told me that despite his best efforts at
indoctrination, 80 percent of the awaam [people] here support
the idea of independence. In Pampore, a town twenty kilometers south of Srinagar that is the birthplace of Sheikh Abdul Aziz,
then jailed commander of Al-Jehad and now a senior gure in the
All-Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), the umbrella coalition
of IJK parties favoring self-determination, most people did not
agree with Azizs pro-Pakistan views. We dont want to exchange
one gulami [slavery] for another, I was told. In war-torn Dodas
Kishtwar town, Maulana Farooq Hussain Kitchloo, the Muslim
communitys spiritual leader, made it clear to me that his heart lay
with the marginalized JKLFs crusade for independence. There are
sizeable pockets of hard-core support for Pakistan in the Valley
and in the Jammu regions Muslim-populated areas, but consistent
with the historical pattern, those who consider their national identity Pakistani constitute a minority opinion in IJK. They are vastly
outnumbered by adherents of the radicalized variant of the old
brand of regional patriotism.
By 1994 the azaadi movement had reached a crossroads. The
underlying division in the movementthe existence of two competing denitions of freedom or self-determination, the rallying cry of 1990had been laid bare by the rise of pro-Pakistan
militants as the ghting force of a population that was still largely
independentist. HM hardliners aggravated the dilemma by attempting to impose their understanding of the azaadi concept.
Between 1992 and 1994 several prominent members of the
Srinagar intelligentsia known for independentist convictions and

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JKLF leanings were mysteriously murdered. Some of these killingsincluding that of Hriday Nath Wanchoo, a Pandit human
rights advocatewere probably the work of elements within the
Indian security apparatus. But others, such as the murder of Dr.
Abdul Ahad Guru, a cardiologist and JKLF ideologue, were probably carried out by pro-Pakistan militants.33 The problem extended
well beyond the elite. In 1995 I spoke with an elderly workingclass man, Mohammed Sha Bhat, in Ganderbal, a town north of
Srinagar. Bhat was consumed with hatred for HM, whose members he described as fundamentalists. He said that in 1993 both
his brothers had been called out of their home and shot dead by
HM men simply because they had collected donations to repair
the shrine and mausoleum of a Su saint which had been damaged by HM cadres.
In June 1994 Qazi Nissar, a respected cleric who held the position of mirwaiz (high priest) of the southern half of the Kashmir
Valley, was murdered in his home near the town of Anantnag by
gunmen said by locals to be from HM. The mirwaiz of the northern Kashmir Valley, Maulvi Farooq, had already been killed by
gunmen said to be from HM in his Srinagar home in May 1990;
now it was the turn of Qazi Nissar, who had been prominent in
the Muslim United Front in 1987 and had lately accused HM of
holding Kashmir to ransom, to hand over to Pakistan on a plate.
Nissars assassination was a turning point in the Kashmir uprising.
An unprecedented outburst of fury at pro-Pakistan insurgents
erupted at his funeral as more than 100,000 mourners chanted
slogans such as Hizb-ul Mujahideen murdabad (Death to HM), Jo
mangega Pakistan, usko milega kabristan (Those who want Pakistan
will be sent to the graveyard), and Hum kya chahtey? Azaadi! (What
do we want? Freedom!). A hartal (general strike) called to protest
the murder was successful, and houses all over the Valley turned

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off their lights between 7pm and 10pm in a show of solidarity. It

was argued that the slogans in no way indicate that Kashmiris
want to live within the Indian Union. Rather, they send a clear signal that Kashmir wants independence from both its neighbors.34
One account of the war in Kashmir that appeared in the mid1990s observed: In the Valley, Pakistans heavy inuence on the
movement is deeply resented, especially among JKLF supporters.
India clearly hopes to exploit the sentiment, once the Kashmiris
nd the ght is futile. In the long run, Pakistans powerful intervention may prove to have undermined the very uprising it sought
to fortify. Another account, also published in the mid-1990s, predicted that in the end, Pakistans policies may push Kashmir,
however reluctantly, deeper into Indias fold.35 These prognoses
were substantially fullled by 19951996, when a new term, renegades, was added to the lexicon of the Kashmir war.
The renegades were guerrillas who gave up the struggle
against India and enlisted as auxiliaries in the Indian war on insurgency. Some were criminal elements, while others were men of
weak political commitment who had joined the guerrilla war at
the peak of azaadi fervor in the early 1990s, discovered that they
had no stomach for a protracted ght against huge Indian forces,
and opportunistically switched sides. But others were genuinely
disillusioned by what they perceived as Pakistans corrupting inuence on the struggle and the willingness of the pro-Pakistan
hard core to perpetrate violence against those among their own
people who did not agree with them. Those disillusioned in this
manner included front-ranking militants who had been active in
pro-Pakistan guerrilla groups in the rst half of the decade. For
example, in May 1996 two former commanders of the Muslim
Jaanbaaz Force and Al-Jehad, and one former commander of HM,
publicly gave up the struggle and resumed civilian lives. By 1995

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HM had acquired a bad reputation for attacking and killing not

just JKLFs pro-independence supporters but also members of
smaller guerrilla groups. Many of these ex-guerrillas, and their relatives and friends, sought protection, or vengeance, or moneyor
all threethrough collaboration with the Indian counterinsurgency campaign.
Two large concentrations of such counterinsurgentsalso
known as pro-India militants and Ikhwanisemerged around
the town of Pattan (Baramulla district) in the northern Valley and
around the town of Anantnag in the southern Valley. Smaller
groups sprang up elsewhere. Their emergence was a great help
to Indias security forces.36 For the rst time since the eruption of
insurgency, Indian authorities had the benet of local collaboration. Some of the former guerrillas were absorbed into a special
counterterrorism force of the Jammu and Kashmir police, known
rst as the Special Task Force and later as the Special Operations
Group (SOG), which has become notorious since its formation in
the mid-1990s for corruption and brutality. Others were given the
status of special police ofcers and attached to paramilitary and
army units operating in their localities, especially to four specialized and notoriously brutal counterinsurgency army formations
collectively called the Rashtriya Ries (RR; National Ries), created to ght guerrillas in the Kashmir Valley and the war zones of
the Jammu region.37 With their assistance, Indian forces were able
to reassert a signicant degree of control over Srinagar and other
Valley towns and some rural areas in the Valley.
The military tide had turned in the Kashmir war. The last mass
protests characteristic of the intifada phase came in May 1995,
when the shrine and mausoleum of Sheikh Nooruddin Noorani,
in the town of Charar-e-Sharief, was gutted by re after a battle
between the Indian army and guerrilla ghters. (Prior to that,

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hundreds of thousands ooded Srinagars streets in May 1994 and

again in October 1994, to welcome the independentist activist
Yasin Malik and the veteran self-determination advocate Shabbir
Shah back to their homeland from extended captivity in Indian
jails, in scenes reminiscent of the mass outpourings of emotion
whenever Sheikh Abdullah was released from Indian jails between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s.) Valley residents generally
blamed the Indian army for the shrines destruction. But in a telling illustration of the inltration of the local struggle for self-determination by foreign or guest militants, the leader of the
guerrillas holed up in Charar-e-Sharief turned out to be Manzoor
Ahmad, alias Mast Gul, a Pakistani veteran of the 1980s war in Afghanistan. In August 1995 ve Western tourists trekking in the
southern Valley were kidnapped by a shadowy group calling itself
Al-Faran, suspected of being a front for the Harkat-ul Ansar group
consisting of religious zealots from Pakistan. One of the tourists,
a Norwegian, was found beheaded; another, an American, managed to escape; and the other three remain missing to this day.
The grim incident, severely condemned by the APHC and attributed by many locals at the time to a sinister Indian plot to defame
the movement, was an early warning that the dayeen phase of
insurgency in Kashmir was on the horizon.

Demoralization and Atrophy (19961998)

One of my friends and informants in Srinagar throughout the
1990s was a resident of Khanyar, a lower-middle-class neighborhood in the old city of Srinagar. Khanyar, a maze of lanes and
alleys packed with wooden houses built in traditional Kashmiri
style, has had a powerful reputation as a militant stronghold since
1989. During the rst half of the 1990s my informant, a trader of
Kashmiri shawls and carpets then in his thirties, would relate the

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exploits of Khanyar militants with great pride and enthusiasm, as

well as stories of Akbar Bhai, an Afghan guest who had helped
local boys take on the BSF before being killed in 1993. I met several local members of militant groupsthe JKLF, Ikhwan-ul
Muslimeen, and Al-Jehadthrough him. They were all his relatives, friends, or neighbors.
In July 1995 I was, for the rst time, advised not to visit the
neighborhood because a few foreign militants had taken shelter
there, and locals could not guarantee my safety. In March 1996 my
friend was in a disconsolate mood, reecting the state of the
azaadi movement. People still deeply desire azaadi, he said, and
almost nobody accepts the legitimacy of the hindustani hukumat
[Indian rule] from their hearts . . . But there is a loss of hope, because the struggle, after so much violence, suffering, and qurbani
[sacrice], has not led to the realization of our huq [rights]. This
was a snapshot of the exhaustion and loss of morale that gripped
the Valley in 19961997. The JKLF was crushed, most of the other
local guerrilla groups formed in the early 1990s had disbanded or
become defunct, and the sole survivor, HM, was facing a determined offensive from the counterinsurgency forces and their new
allies, the renegades. Staring defeat in the face, my friend was
now hoping that activists of jehadi groups from Pakistan, who had
been steadily inltrating into IJK since 1993, would keep the struggle alive.
It was not that violence ceased in IJK during this period. According to ofcial Indian gures, 1,209 guerrillas were killed in
1996, 1,075 in 1997, and 999 in 1998 (after 1998 the gure started
climbing again, to 1,082 in 1999 and 1,612 in 2000; during the rst
eleven months of 2002 as many as 1,581 guerrillas were killed).
The human rights situation continued to be graveit was in 1996
that Jaleel Andrabi, a human rights lawyer associated with JKLF,

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was picked up in the streets of Srinagar by RR soldiers and renegades and tortured to death. But by and large the armed conict
was now less visiblecentered in rural, often remote areas in the
Valley and Jammus Doda district and in newly emerging theaters
of war, such as the twin LOC districts of Rajouri and Poonch in
the Jammu region.
The beginnings of supercial normalcy became visible in the
urban landscape of Srinagar, a city that had been under virtual
siege from 1990 to 1995. The unsightly bunkers were reduced in
number, the checkpoints were fewer and less aggressive during
daylight hours, and there was even some pedestrian and automobile trafc in the city center after dusk. During the summer of
1997, thousands of middle-class Srinagar families made the excursion to Gulmarg, a popular resort forty-ve kilometers from the
city, for the rst time in almost a decade. In 2002 a Srinagar newspaper noted the change since the end of the intifada phase: The
streets are silent. The crowds of boys dispersed. Many resting
in graves and others struggling to survive as ordinary citizens.38
Indeed, the spontaneous crowds never returned to the streets on
a mass scale, although localized protests, usually in response to
mistreatment and alleged atrocities at the hands of Indian security forces, remained a frequent feature of community life in IJK.
When the struggle was renewed after the period of relative lull, it
took a deadlier form than the popular upsurge of the early 1990s.
The government of India saw the relative quiet of 19961998
as an opportunity to complete its pacication campaign. Its strategy was to supplement continuing repression with reinstallation
of a civilian IJK government. In May 1996 Indias parliamentary
elections were held in IJK (IJK had been excluded from the previous parliamentary election, in 1991). Then in September 1996 elections were held, after a gap of almost a decade (since March 1987),

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to constitute a new IJK legislative assembly. Farooq Abdullah and

a gaggle of his NC retainers were resurrected from political oblivion and won a two-thirds majority in the eighty-seven-member
legislature (forty-six deputies elected from Valley, thirty-seven
from Jammu, and four from Ladakh). Abdullah was duly reinstalled as IJK chief minister at the head of a new government. The
Hurriyat Conference, formed during the intifada phase of the
uprising as a coordinating body of IJKs spectrum of parties favoring self-determination, mounted a boycott against the Indiansponsored electoral processin the face of harassment by security forces and pro-India militantsdemanding instead tripartite
talks on the Kashmir question between India, Pakistan, and representatives of the azaadi movement. Both sets of elections, particularly the rst, were severely marred by low turnout in most Valley
constituencies and pro-azaadi areas of Jammu, widespread allegations of people being coerced to vote by security forces and renegades, especially in rural communities, and other forms of fraud.39
Just prior to the autumn 1996 elections, I traveled around
Badgam, a district in the center of the Kashmir Valley. Some areas
of Badgam, and contiguous pockets in the neighboring Baramulla
district, are dominated by Shia Muslims, the minority sect in Islam
and in the Valley. After leaving Srinagar, I stopped rst in the main
market in the district town of Badgam. There a middle-aged shopkeeper told me that he was going to vote in the forthcoming elections, in the faint hope that reestablishment of some sort of civilian administration in Srinagar would bring relief from the gun
culture of the security forces, the militants, and the renegades.
But, he said, if you ask me what I really want from my heart
and you want me to give a truthful reply, I can only say: azaadi
and khudmukhtari [self-rule]. I then drove to Soibugh, known
throughout the Valley and beyond as the home village of a num-

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ber of leading militants, including HMs leader Yusuf Shah, alias

Syed Salahuddin; Ashraf Dar, a senior HM commander killed by
Indian forces in 1993; and Shabbir Siddiqui, a senior JKLF leader
killed by Indian forces in March 1996. During the elections to the
Indian parliament in May 1996, the village had registered an apparently impressive voter participation, including Salahuddins own
brother.
As a Kashmiri companion (a Srinagar lawyer) and I passed a
fortied army camp and entered the village, we encountered the
older brother of the recently slain JKLF leader Shabbir Siddiqui.
He politely declined to be seen engaging in an extended conversation with me. He said that the village and its environs were classied as a super-sensitive red zone by the security forces, the
army was patrolling constantly, and he feared there were informers in the village. He did not want to risk a nocturnal visit from
soldiers and renegades inquiring about his conversation with a
visitor. (Six years later, Soibugh was still a war zone. In September
2002 three policemen and a HM ghter were killed in an hourlong battle on the villages outskirts.)40 At the tea shop on
Soibughs dusty main street, my companion and I were met with
suspicious stares from the assembled group of villagers. On being
informed that I was an Indian researcher, they assured me with
alacrity that there will be a huge turnout of voters here in the
assembly elections. My companion then spoke to them in
Kashmiri, trying to convince them, he later told me, that I was not
an Indian army ofcer in plain clothes or an intelligence agent.
The tune changed. We want azaadi, the villagers chorused in
unison, with a conviction that had been markedly absent in the
earlier response.
On the way back to Srinagar, I stopped at a martyrs cemeteryone of hundreds that dot the war zones of IJKin another

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Badgam village, Warapora. As I walked around the cemetery, followed by a friendly crowd of curious children, I noticed from the
inscriptions on the tombstones that while almost all the graves
from 19901994 were of locals who had fallen in the guerrilla
struggle, the more recent 19951996 graves were a mix of locals
and volunteer ghters from towns and districts in Pakistan
(mainly Pakistani Punjab). Around the time I visited that village
cemetery, Nadeem Khatib was making the decision of his life in
an afuent Srinagar home. The war in Kashmir was far from over;
it was merely simmering.

The Fidayeen Phase (19992002)

The onset of the dayeen phase of insurgency was presaged by a
brief thaw in India-Pakistan relations. The year 1998 was South
Asias nuclear summer, when India tested ve nuclear devices and
Pakistan responded with six tests a few weeks later. Initially it
seemed that overt nuclearization of the subcontinent might produce some benign side effects. In February 1999 Indias prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee traveled to Pakistan on the rst run of
a bus service connecting Delhi with Lahore, a major Pakistani
Punjab city close to the border with Indian Punjab. Vajpayee and
his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, sharing a vision of
peace and stability and recognizing that the nuclear dimension
of the security environment of the two countries adds to their responsibility for avoidance of conict, signed a Lahore Declaration during the visit. The declaration pledged a composite and
integrated dialogue process on the basis of an agreed bilateral
agenda, and resolved to intensify efforts to resolve all issues, including the issue of Jammu and Kashmir.41
Vajpayees decision to extend an olive branch to Pakistan was
possibly encouraged by the Indian security establishments upper

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hand over guerrilla militancy in IJK. But the promise of Lahore

evaporated on the barren peaks and ranges of Kargil, in IJKs
Ladakh, in the summer of 1999, as Pakistani regular units supported by jehadi volunteers inltrated the Indian side of the LOC
and the Indian military launched a massive land and air campaign
to evict the inltrators. Indian ofcials and commentators have
claimed that the Pakistani operation was masterminded by General Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistans chief of army staff. Six
weeks into the ghting, Nawaz Sharif agreed to withdraw Pakistani forces after a tense meeting with U.S. President Bill Clinton
on 4 July 1999 in Washington. The humiliating climbdown sealed
the fate of Sharif s civilian regime, already unpopular in Pakistan
because of rampant corruption and persecution of critics and
political opponents. In October 1999 Sharif moved to dismiss
Musharraf in a failed preemptive strike, and the armed forces deposed Sharif. The border conict in Kargil aroused jingoistic nationalism throughout India, with the notable exception of Indian
Jammu and Kashmir, where public opinion in most areas ranged
from sullenly indifferent to bitterly hostile.42
The rst dayeen (literally, life-daring) raid occurred in July 1999,
shortly after the end of the Kargil hostilities, when two guerrillas
simply barged into a BSF camp in Bandipore, a northern Valley town, ring indiscriminately from automatic ries and lobbing grenades. The Indian armys cantonment area in Srinagars
Badami Bagh locality was penetrated with the same simple but
deadly tactic later in 1999. Between mid-1999 and the end of 2002,
at least 55 dayeen attacks, usually executed by two-man teams,
were targeted against police, paramilitary and army camps, and
government installations in IJK, mostly in the Kashmir Valley. Of
these, 29 took place in 2001, making that year the high point of
the dayeen campaign. According to Indian counterinsurgency au-

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thorities, 161 military, paramilitary, and police personnel died in

these attacks (the Indian army alone lost 82 men), and 90 militants
perished while executing them.43
The bulk of the raids have been attributed by Indian security
sources to one militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which consists of religious radicals from Pakistan and was headquartered
until early 2002 at Muridke, near Lahore in Pakistans Punjab
province. Most of the rest have been attributed to Jaish-eMohammad ( JeM), another zealot group that is led by Pakistanis,
has a predominantly Pakistani membership, and is the direct descendant of Harkat-ul Ansar, which was active in IJK in the mid1990s.44 LeT denies that its raids are suicide missionspreferring
to call them daredevil actionssince the group follows an ultraorthodox version of Sunni Islam that strictly prohibits suicide,
but the raids nonetheless have an undeniably suicidal character.
The attackers almost never return from these penetrate-and-kill
missionstheir aim is not to save their own lives but to maximize
the frightening psychological impact on the enemy by inicting
death and destruction on their targets. The LeTs mouthpiece Jihad Times (published until 2001 from Islamabad, Pakistans capital)
and JeMs fortnightly Urdu journal (also published in Pakistan)
have both discussed suicidal warfare in Kashmir. LeT refers to
members who execute such operations as dayeen (those who
dare their lives), while JeM refers to its khudkush shaheed dasta (selfsacricing martyrs unit).45
In December 2001 a heavily armed ve-man squad managed to
enter the compound of Indias Parliament building in New Delhi
and then attempted to enter the building itself, where hundreds of
parliamentarians and government ministers were present at the
time. The attackers were killed by security ofcers after a fortyve-minute battle with guns and grenades. Nine other people, in-

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cluding security staff, parliament stewards, and a gardener tending

the grounds, also died. Indian authorities said the raiders were Pakistanis and had been helped and harbored by three men from the
Kashmir Valley residing in Delhi. India began a massive military
buildup on Pakistans borders. Primarily in response to U.S. pressure, in January 2002 General Musharraf announced a crackdown
on jehadi groups operating across the LOC from Pakistani territory. LeT and JeM were banned along with several other violent
sectarian groups active within Pakistan.
But after a four-month lull, three gunmen struck again in
dayeen style in May 2002, targeting a camp near Jammu city housing families of Indian soldiers. They killed more than thirty people, mostly civilians, and war tensions escalated sharply in the
subcontinent. In July 2002 gunmen suspected by Indian authorities to be LeT members struck on the outskirts of Jammu city,
massacring twenty-nine Hindus in a slum district before eeing.
Whether by design or accident, the date of the massacre was the
seventy-rst anniversary of the 13 July 1931 Srinagar massacre of
twenty-one Muslim protesters by police, the incident that catalyzed mass political awareness in Kashmir. The Hurriyat Conference coalition and other groups favoring self-determination organized protests in Srinagar against the massacre. In an interview
given to an Indian news agency by satellite phone from his mountain base, the top Hizb-ul Mujahideen commander for the Jammu
region condemned the carnage as inhuman and un-Islamic and
said he suspect[ed] that the massacre was carried out by foreign
militants.46 In early August 2002 an annual Hindu pilgrimage in
the southern part of the Kashmir Valley was attacked, and nine
pilgrims and a gunman were killed. In November 2002 two gunmen struck in the heart of the old bazaar in Jammu city, and
one of them entered a popular Hindu shrine in the neighbor-

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hood, ring indiscriminately. A dozen people, mostly civilians,

were killed in the incident, along with the two attackers. Indian
authorities once again suspected the LeT of being behind the raid.
By the end of 2002, however, it was clear that the frequency of
dayeen raids had decreased signicantly in IJK compared to 2001
or even 2000. At the same time, the selection of targets had widened beyond the security forces, and targets appeared to be chosen, and attacks timed, to increase communal antagonisms in IJK
and, most important, to keep India-Pakistan relations in a precarious limbo. The highly publicized attacks, especially those against
soft targets, provided the Indian governments Hindu nationalist
leadership with the main justication for its hard-line stance rejecting resumption of a dialogue on Kashmir with the Musharraf
regimebranded in India as the sponsor of cross-border terrorismoverruling mild pressure on New Delhi by the United
States and other Western countries.
Peace efforts faltered in this atmosphere of violence. In July
2000 HM, the only insurgent force composed predominantly of
IJK residents (augmented by some from AJK), declared a temporary ceasere, but withdrew it after two weeks amid a sharp escalation of guerrilla violence, including a car-bomb explosion in
the center of Srinagar claimed by HM and a series of massacres
of Hindus in the Kashmir Valley and the Jammu region for which
jehadi groups of Pakistani origin were generally considered responsible. The episode exposed a rift between moderate and hardline HM members, and pro-truce commanders were purged from
the organization in 2001. In November 2000 Prime Minister
Vajpayee announced a one-month halt to offensive operations by
Indian security forces in IJK to coincide with the Muslim holy
month of Ramzan/Ramadan. This too petered out within
months amid intensied guerrilla and state violence. In July 2001

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Musharraf visited India at Vajpayees invitation for talks with the

top members of Indias government, which proved inconclusive.
The Indians emphasized the destabilizing effect of cross-border
terrorism originating in Pakistan, while the Pakistanis emphasized the need for Indian commitment to a serious political dialogue on the Kashmir question.

Three points can be made about the dayeen phase of insurgency

in Kashmir. First, the use of suicidal tactics as a weapon of war is
neither novel nor the monopoly of militant Muslims. The Japanese kamikaze of World War II used the tactic extensively. Among
contemporary political movements, Palestinian militantsespecially but not exclusively their Islamist winghave resorted to
the tactic with increasing frequency and decreasing discrimination
since the second intifada began in the autumn of 2000. But the
most effective and most deadly practitioners of suicidal warfare in
the South Asian subcontinentand possibly in the worldsince
the 1980s have been the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, whose ghters
are Hindu, Christian, agnostic, or atheist.47
Second, it is true that the main ideologues and practitioners of
suicidal warfare in the Kashmir war are radical Islamist groups of
Pakistani provenance. JeM, for example, claimed responsibility for
an October 2001 raid by a dayeen squad on the Indian legislative
assembly complex in Srinagar in which thirty-eight people were
killedmostly local Muslim policemen on guard duty and Muslim civilian employees of the legislature secretariatand even
identied a member from Peshawar, Pakistan, by name as the
driver of the jeep bomb that exploded at the heavily guarded entrance and enabled the other members of the suicide squad to enter the complex (the group retracted the claim two days later).

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However, suicidal warfare in Kashmir is not exclusively a crossborder phenomenon, but rather is the product of the incendiary
infusion of the ideology and tactics of trans-national Islamist militancy into a brutalized, desperate local environmentthat is, of a
conjunction of internal and external factors. In May 2000 JeM carried out its rst suicide attack in the Kashmir Valley when a JeM
militant exploded a car bomb at the entrance to the Srinagar headquarters of the Indian armys 15th Corps, which is deployed in the
Valley. The militant was Afaq Ahmed Shah, aged seventeen, a high
school student from Srinagars Khanyar neighborhood. Born in
1983 into a religious family, Afaq had endured a childhood consumed by rebellion, oppression, and despair. Like Nadeem Khatib,
he was internally tormented by what he saw around him and
eventually decided that he could no longer be a passive witness.
If Ashfaq Wani and Yasin Malik personify the intifada generation of the azaadi movement, Afaq Shah and Nadeem Khatib represent its dayeen generation. In December 2000 another JeM car
bomber attempted to breach the perimeter of the 15th Corps
headquartersthis time it was twenty-four-year-old Mohammed
Bilal from Manchester, England, a British citizen of Pakistani descent. In September 2000, on a day I happened to be in the Kashmir Valley, a RR camp in the town of Beerwah in Badgam districtnot far from the village of Soibughwas attacked by two
dayeen. They killed an Indian major and thirteen soldiers before
they were nally cornered and killed. One of them was a jehadi
militant from Pakistan, the other a Kashmiri-speaking Muslim
from a mountain village in the Jammu regions Udhampur district. Two years later, in November 2002, a dayeen duo armed
with assault ries and hand grenades penetrated a CRPF camp in
the heart of Srinagar, killing six troopers and losing their own
lives. A LeT spokesman named the attackers as Abu Younis, a Pa-

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kistani militant, and Reyaz Ahmad Khan, a local ghter from the
southern Valley town of Qazigund.48
The third point about the dayeen phase is that its most spectacular and most publicized attacks have been directed against such
high-prole targets as the Indian armys cantonment and operational headquarters in Srinagar, the headquarters of the SOG in
Srinagar, Srinagars airport, and the legislatures premises in
Srinagar, in addition to multiple attacks at various locations in
Jammu city, including its railway station, its old bazaar, and at least
one shantytown district. However, the crucial theaters of war in
this phase lie away from urban centers, in the rural areas, dotted
with small towns, of IJKs sprawling interior. These remote locales
and frontiers of conict in Rajouri-Poonch ( Jammu region) and
Kupwara (Kashmir Valley)scenes of a deadly, daily war of attritionare key to an understanding of the complexity of the contemporary Kashmir problem.

As ghting in the Kashmir Valley diminished in 19961997, the

twin Jammu districts of Rajouri and Poonch were becoming the
most active theater of the Kashmir war. Their relative tranquillity
during the intifada phase is something of a puzzle, since both are
Muslim-dominated districts (Rajouri 65 percent, Poonch 90 percent) and lie alongside 250 kilometers of hilly border on the LOC.
There are three explanations for the puzzle. First, unlike Doda
district in the Jammu interior, which was gripped by insurgency
from the early 1990s on, the Muslim majorities of Rajouri-Poonch
are not ethnolinguistically identical to the Valleys population.
Except in a Kashmiri-speaking Muslim belt in the northeastern
corner of Poonch district, abutting the Valley, Rajouri-Poonchs
Muslims belong largely to non-Kashmiri ethnic communities

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Gujjars, Bakerwals, Rajputs, even a sprinkling of Pathans. The single largest ethnic group in the two districts is the Gujjars, a traditionally nomadic people who rear livestock and cultivate farmland
in highland areas. Gujjars make up 48 percent of the population in
Poonch and 50 percent in Rajouri.49 The dominant language in the
hill tracts of Rajouri-Poonch is neither Kashmiri nor Dogri, which
is spoken in Jammus Hindu-dominated south, but Pahadi, a dialect of Punjabi. Because of ethnolinguistic distance from the core
area of the azaadi campaign, the Kashmir Valley, Rajouri-Poonch
Muslims, unlike the Kashmiri speakers of Doda-Kishtwar, were
not swept up in the movement.
Second, because of their location on or near the border,
Rajouri-Poonch Muslims suffered greatly in the India-Pakistan conicts of 19471948, 1965, and 1971. The area was ercely contested
during the hostilities of 19471948. During the 1965 war, older residents recalled to me thirty-ve years later, truckloads of Muslim
men were arrested by the Indian army for suspect loyalties and
taken away to Jammu city for interrogation, where many were
brutally treated and some killed. Indeed, in 1965 100,000 Hindus
and Sikhs were forced to ee from Chhamb-Jaurian area in [southwestern] Jammu when the Pakistan army overran it, and 70,000
Muslims had to leave their ancestral homes in Poonch-Rajouri
and cross into Azad Kashmir partly . . . because they were harassed by the Indian army and local Hindus and Sikhs.50 Displaced people of all religious communities were largely able to
return after the war, but this precarious history made local Muslims wary of retribution at the hands of the Indian military if they
joined the 1990 uprising. Third, the 250 kilometers of the LOC
running on a north-south axis in Poonch and Rajouri have been
a major route for guerrillas inltrating the LOC into IJK since
1990. The entire stretch is full of inltration corridors known

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locally as galis (alleys); Indian army brigades stationed on the

LOC are named after galis in their areas of responsibilityBG Brigade (Bhimbar Gali Brigade), JWG Brigade ( Jharan Wali Gali Brigade), and so on. However, from 1990 to 1995 guerrillas inltrating
through the Rajouri-Poonch sector (often with the assistance of
Gujjar guides) preferred to simply pass through the two districts
to the high-priority areas of insurgencythe Valley and Doda
district.
As insurgency faltered in the Valley, the post-1995 generation of
inltrating militants began to pay greater attention to Rajouri
and Poonch. By 1998 the twin districts were in the grip of guerrilla war. As violence and repression engulfed the area, jehadi
inltrators from Pakistan and AJK began to acquire some support among local Muslims. As Majid Khan, a popular trade union
leader in the worst-affected zone, Poonch districts Surankote
tehsil, told me in the autumn of 2000: There is a socioeconomic
basis for militancy here. Most people are quite poor, and often
lack drinking water, educational opportunities, and health care.
The local administration and India-backed politicians are usually
callous to their needs. In some parts of India, similar problems
of poverty and marginalization have spawned ultra-leftist movements. Here, in a border area of a disputed territory, grievance
nds a different outlet. Humiliating experiences at the hands of
the army can turn people into guerrilla sympathizers and even active militants in some cases.
According to the commander of Romeo Force, the specialized
counterinsurgency wing of the Indian military in Rajouri-Poonch,
his soldiers killed 166 guerrillas during the six-month period between 15 March and 15 September 2000, of whom 89 (54 percent)
were foreignersthat is, Pakistani nationals and AJK residents.
By 2001 the ghting had got worse. In the ten-month period be-

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tween 1 January and 31 October 2001, the Romeo Force killed as

many as 572 insurgents, almost half of all guerrilla casualties in IJK
during the period. During 2002 the ghting continued unabated.
On a typical day, 28 April 2002, twelve guerrillas were killed in the
twin districts, six while trying to inltrate through Bhimbar Gali
and another six inside Indian territory.51
All the major jehadi groups dominated by PakistanisLeT,
JeM, Al-Badr, Tehreek-ul Mujahideen, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, and
Harkat-ul-Jehad-i-Islamiare active in the area. In addition, HM
has a signicant presence, especially in the Pir Panjal mountains, a
range that traverses a massive east-west arc across the northern
Kashmiri-speaking part of Poonch district, the southern part of
the Valley, the mountainous Gujjar and Kashmiri Muslim-dominated upper reaches of Jammus Udhampur district, and nally
Doda district. The HMs ghting units in this area are called the
Hizb-ul Mujahideen Pir Panjal Regiment and, as in the Valley and
Doda, are mostly recruited from the local population, augmented
by a sizeable AJK element. In April 2002 it was reported that leaders of the main guerrilla outts had met in Surankotes hills and
established a mechanism, headed by a commander of local origin,
to coordinate operations in ten sectors across the Jammu region.52
The 250-kilometer, eight-hour journey by road from Jammu
city to the town of Poonch, which I undertook in the autumn of
2000, is a lesson in the complex dynamics of the Kashmir conict.
The road snakes in a northwesterly direction parallel to one of the
most disturbed and militarized borders in the world, where smallarms exchanges as well as mortar, machine-gun, and artillery duels between the Indian and Pakistani armies are routine. For the
rst fty kilometers the road runs alongside the working boundary between Indian Jammu and Pakistani Punjab ( Jammu city
and Sialkot, a large Pakistani Punjab town, are just thirty kilome-

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ters apart). Near the Indian town of Akhnur, the working boundary becomes the Line of Control as Pakistani Punjab gives way to
AJK on the other side. Beyond Akhnur the Jammu plains gradually
give way to Rajouri districts hills, and the road begins to climb
in sharp twists and turns. It is dotted from there on with milestones put up by the Indian armys border roads organization, entreating drivers to be gentle on my curves. There are also numerous army billboards, written in Hindi-speaking north Indias
Devanagari script, which proclaim Kashmir se Kanyakumari tak,
mera Bharat mahaan! (From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, my India is
great; Kanyakumari, previously known as Cape Comorin, is the
southernmost tip of the Indian subcontinent.)
The reality is far less sanguine. These are classic borderlands,
where no magnitude of manpower or repower can ensure secure
control, and where the allegiances of much of the population are
at least somewhat suspect. Indeed, religion, ethnicity, and intense
inter-state rivalry over territory and the allegiance of peoplethe
dening features of the Kashmir conictcome together in an
incendiary mix in the borderlands of Rajouri and Poonch. Until
partition and war in 19471948, Rajouri and Poonch had close economic and ethnolinguistic ties not only with the AJK districts
of Mirpur and Muzaffarabad but also with the western (Pakistani)
Punjab districts of Rawalpindi, Jhelum, Campbellpur, and
Mianwali and even the districts of Abbotabad and Mansehra in Pakistans Frontier Province. Many families in border villages of
Poonch and Rajouri still have relatives on the Pakistani side of the
LOC. In fact, the historic, pre-1948 Poonch district, which played
such a central role in the events of 1947 (see Chapter 1) is bifurcated by the LOC, and the Pakistani-controlled part of Poonch
is still a prime source of recruits to the Pakistani army. In an interesting twist, although both (Indian) Poonch and Rajouri are

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Muslim-majority districts, the towns of Rajouri and Poonch

which are the districts centers of administration, commerce, and
educationhave predominantly Hindu (and Sikh) populations
(the countryside is largely Muslim, overwhelmingly so in the case
of Poonch). Many of these Hindus and Sikhs are 1947 refugees,
and descendants of those refugees, from Pakistani Kashmir. For
example, many Hindus and Sikhs in Rajouri town trace their origins to Kotli, an AJK town and district directly to the west across
the LOC, and those in the town of Poonch to Rawalakot, an AJK
town and district to its west.
The rst sign of the war zone, apart from Indian military convoys, appeared in Rajouris southern foothills, on the way from
Akhnur to a town called Nowshera, in the form of a Village Defence Committee (VDC) foot patrol. The VDCs are a network
of self-defense militia set up by Indian authorities across the
Jammu region, and draw mainly on Hindu and Sikh villagers living in or on the periphery of insurgency-affected areas. The patrol
we encountered consisted of some twenty villagers, all Hindu,
dressed in tattered clothes and scuffed shoes and clutching antiquated .303 ries. They had a litany of complaints: they are paid a
pittance, given bolt-action ries and a rationed supply of bullets to
confront the guerrillas AK-47s and grenade launchers, and denied
wireless sets needed to communicate news of guerrilla movements and attacks to the nearest army base. However, they were
determined to defend their village to the best of their ability.
Leaving this clutch of ragged but gallant warriors behind, we
reached the district town of Rajouri after a ve-hour, 150-kilometer drive from Jammu city. Although the market was bustling and
Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh shops were trading side by side, there
was a discernible air of tension in the town.
The surrounding countryside is convulsed with guerrilla war-

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fare and counterinsurgency, and there is deep distrust between the

towns Muslim and non-Muslim citizens. In November 2001 the
headmaster of a village school near the town, a Kashmiri-speaking Muslim, was executed by guerrillas in front of his students
because one of his daughters, a doctor, is married to an army
major, while another daughter is a police sub-inspector. In December 2001 a district judge, a Hindu, was shot dead along with
two bodyguards and a friend by guerrillas who ambushed their car
on the Rajouri-Poonch road. In January 2002 nine Muslims from a
nearby village were killed when they were allegedly used by RR
troops as human shields during an operation against guerrillas.
The town of Rajouri is a tinderbox, and violence spills over regularly from the hinterland. In February 2002 guerrillas red 170mm.
Chinese rockets from a hill overlooking the town at the Indian
armys divisional headquarters in the town. In July 2002 four LeT
guerrillas inltrated the towns high-security enclave housing the
residences of senior police ofcers and civil administrators. All
four were killed, along with an Indian army captain, in the ensuing overnight encounter.53
Our destination, the town of Poonch, is another hundred kilometers north of Rajouri town, a three-hour drive on mountain
roads. We covered the distance as fast as possible; dusk was approaching and much of the route passed through Poonch districts
Surankote tehsil, the hotbed of armed conict. In November 2001
eleven army personnel, including a major and a junior commissioned ofcer, died in a guerrilla ambush near a village twenty kilometers from the town of Surankote. In July 2002 seven guerrillas and three army personnel, again including a major, were killed
in a single day in two separate battles in Surankote tehsil. In late
July an army ofcer and two local policemen, both Muslim, were
killed in another guerrilla ambush, and in August two brothers in

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a Surankote village were killed by the army because they allegedly

aided guerrillas. Also in August, seven inltrating JeM militants
were intercepted and killed by the army in the neighboring tehsil
of Mendhar.54
The war intrudes periodically into the grimy town of
Surankote, which is permanently on edge. In late April 2002 militants lobbed a grenade on an Army vehicle at Hadi Mohalla Bazaar [Surankotes market] . . . The grenade exploded injuring ve
soldiers and some pedestrians. An encounter broke out and in
the crossre, two civilians were killed and fourteen injured including three women. Two militants were also killed and a shop destroyed in the exchange. In late August 2002 two guerrillas entered the house of Azad Ahmed Khan, an SOG ofcer, shot
dead his father, brother, sister-in-law, and nephew, and critically
wounded two other family members. In September 2002 guerrillas exploded bombs and opened re at the main bus stand in the
town, killing eight paramilitary BSF personnel, three local police ofcers, and two civilians. Two of the attackers also died; at
least ten civilians and several BSF men were wounded.55 For most
of the thirty kilometers between the towns of Surankote and
Poonch, the paved road degenerates into a barely passable dirt
track. As we drove along this road as dusk fell, crossing decrepit
bridges over mountain streams and passing ghostly hamlets seemingly inhabited only by watchful Indian soldiers, my driver joked:
Sir, whenever I travel along this stretch of road I never know
whether Im going straight to Poonch or straight to heaven. This
was among other things a reference to the condition of the road,
which is pitted with craters of varying sizes caused by land mines
and IED (improvised explosive device) blasts, requiring an uncommon mastery of the steering wheel.
We found the town of Poonch, which has a mixed population

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of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, in a state of virtual siege. As

armed police patrolled the darkened streets, Yashpal Sharma, a
political leader in the town and a Hindu, told us that the surrounding villages were teeming with militants and anything
could happen at any time. Indeed, guerrillas attacked the towns
police station with rocket-propelled grenades shortly after my
visit. In the dak bungalow (rest house) where we spent the night,
my next-door neighbor turned out to be a young police commander, a leader in the local ght against insurgency. A Kashmirispeaking Muslim from the Jammu regions Doda district, he spoke
with frustration of the Indian states unsympathetic attitude toward IJKs aggrieved people, and recounted how the army frequently mistreats locals and mishandles situations. But, his Sikh
deputy commander at his side, he also described with pride how
his unit had eliminated eight inltrated JeM militants in a erce
encounter near the town a month earlier.
He showed me an inventory of equipment seized from slain
guerrillas and mountain hideouts since the beginning of 2000.
The arsenal included assault ries, sniper ries, machine guns,
grenade launchers, mortar bombs, hand grenades, antitank rockets, antitank and antipersonnel mines, IEDs of various types, remote controls for detonating mines and IEDs, large quantities of
plastic explosive, ame-throwers, night-vision devices, binoculars,
state-of-the-art radio sets, and decoding sheets for coded communications. As I perused this arsenal and the ofcer tuned his own
radio set to two guerrilla units in nearby mountains bantering in
rustic Punjabi, one reason for the spread and tenacity of insurgency in Rajouri-Poonch became clear to me: this jehad was a
highly sophisticated operation supported by a professional military establishment across the LOC.
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the LOC was not, however, the whole story. The police commander adroitly avoided answering my question of whether it
was possible for a relatively small number of inltrated jehadi militants from Pakistan to generate this level of disturbance across a
large area without support from at least part of the local population (Rajouri and Poonch districts together have almost nine hundred thousand people).
The following morning my companions and I drove back from
Poonch toward Surankote. Our plan was to have a late breakfast
with Chaudhary Mohammad Aslam, the top leader of the Gujjar
community of Rajouri-Poonch, at his home in a village called
Lassana, just off the Poonch-Surankote road. A few kilometers before Lassana, we were stopped by a road-opening party of the
Romeo Force, whose thankless job is to check the road every
morning for mines and IEDs planted by guerrillas during the
night.
The soldiers, from homes in diverse parts of India, were
equipped with mine-proof armored patrol vehicles manufactured
in South Africa, and were very tense. They had reason to be nervous. In late August 2001, militants beheaded two priests of a
Kali [Hindu] temple near the Dhundak bridge spanning the
Suran river, from which the town and tehsil take their name. (On
the same day, in nearby villages, guerrillas massacred a Muslim
family of ve who had refused to give them food, and killed two
Muslim village ofcials.) An indenite curfew was imposed in
Surankote and Poonch towns following the beheading of the
priests to prevent communal violence between Hindus and Muslims, and police forces were deployed in the sensitive areas of
Rajouri town. By the bodies of the two priests, left along the
Surankote-Poonch road near Lassana village, the security forces
found a box of fruit containing an IED with a 10-kilogram RDX

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[plastic explosive] charge. Army vehicles frequently use this particular road. In May 2002 three ultras of Jaish-e-Mohammad outt
were killed in an encounter during a joint operation by the police
and army in Lassana village in Poonch district. In November 2002
four persons were killed when unidentied gunmen ambushed a
private vehicle near Lassana on the Rajouri-Poonch road.56
Chaudhary Aslam, a courtly man in his sixties, greeted us
warmly in his heavily fortied and guarded hilltop farmhouse.
Currently senior vice president of the Congress party in IJK, he
has had a long, distinguished career in IJKs political establishment. At various times over three decades he has been education
minister, agriculture minister, speaker of the IJK legislative assembly, and president of the Congress party in IJK. Nobody wants
Pakistan here, he assured me with an air of condence. If any
Gujjars provide food, shelter, or intelligence to insurgents, or act
as their guides and couriers, he said, the reason was majboori se
(they are threatened or coerced into doing so) or else garibi se (because of poverty, they give some assistance for money). But, I
asked, was it not a fact that some Gujjar youth had actually joined
the insurgents? Yes, he replied with a pained look, the rhetoric
of jehad has had some effect, unfortunately.
It was only after our meeting over a delicious breakfast of meat,
bread, and cheese that I discovered that Chaudhary Aslams own
antecedents are more uid than he might like to acknowledge.
During the 19471948 ghting in Rajouri and Poonch, Aslams father, a Gujjar notable called Chaudhary Ghulam Hussein, sided
with Pakistan and migrated to the Pakistani side of the ceasere
line in early 1949. He returned in 1954, under an amnesty law
passed by Sheikh Abdullahs government, after which his son embarked on his career as an Indian politician. But the allegiances of
the next generation of Gujjars had once again, apparently, be-

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come indeterminate. Aslam did not disclose to me that one of his

nephews was a guerrilla in the area. In September 2002 Aslam was
sharing a dais with senior Congress leaders at a party rally in
Surankote town when guerrillas attacked the towns bus stand a
stones throw away, killing sixteen people, mostly Indian security
personnel.
About two hundred kilometers north of Poonch, guerrilla
war continues in Kupwara, the Kashmir Valleys most inltrationprone district. In late April 2002 I visited Kupwaras remote and
picturesque Lolaab valley, a militant redoubt close to the LOC.
A Lolaab village, Trehgam, is the birthplace of Maqbool Butt, cofounder of JKLF in the 1960s. The atmosphere was tense. The
previous day nine HM guerrillas had died in a battle with the
army in the neighboring Nowgam sector of Kupwara districts
Handwara tehsil. Eight of the slain militants were natives of
Kupwara villages, the ninth a guest ghter from Pakistan.57 We
drove out of Kupwara town and through the checkpoint at the
armys Zangli garrison, the entry point to the sprawling Lolaab
valley. As we entered the Pothushahi forest area of Lolaab, we
saw SOG and army personnel engaged in a major crackdown in
a village called Wavoora. The next day we discovered that we
had witnessed mopping-up operations after a LeT battalion commander, Farmanullah of Pakistan, was killed in an encounter with
Army and Special Operations Group of local police at Pothushahi
forest in Lolaab area of Kupwara district.58 We continued toward
Sogam, the only town in Lolaab, through an idyllic landscape
of farming villages and orchards watered by mountain streams.
We drove along rural back roads saturated with military vehicle
trafc and Nepalese Gurkha soldiers on foot patrol alongside peasants driving tongas (horse carts), and through peaceful-looking

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villages guarded by Ikhwanis, onetime guerrillas turned pro-India

gunmen.
Sogam has a political history. A bastion of the historic National
Conference, it was a major center of the Quit Kashmir movement
of 1946 (see Chapter 1) and the site of mass arrests. An atmosphere of repression and fear still prevailed in Sogam fty-six years
later. In late June 2002 insurgents red rie grenades at the house
of Sogams representative in the IJK legislature, Mushtaq Ahmed
Lone, a minister in the NC government. Lone was in Srinagar, but
his elderly parents were in the house. The attack injured ve
CRPF paramilitary police posted on guard duty, two seriously.
In September 2002 Lone was assassinated along with ve bodyguards in a Lolaab village while campaigning for reelection to
the assembly. One civilian also died in the attack, and twelve others were injured, four critically.59 The ministers funeral in Sogam,
attended by various Indian dignitaries who ew into the remote
area, was marred by guerrillas ring heavy machine guns and
rocket-propelled grenades from the surrounding hills. Indeed,
when personnel of the J&K police stood for the guard of honor
before the ministers cofn, their bugles and gunshots were
drowned in the noise of militant re, and two soldiers were
killed and ve wounded while ghting guerrillas who attempted
to storm the funeral site.60
On the way back from Sogam to Kupwara town, we stopped
for tea at the residence of Lolaabs chief forest ofcer. It turned
out that the ofcer, in his fties, had served four years in jail, from
1989 to 1993, for being a member of the pro-Pakistan Peoples
League. In mid-July 2002 ve ghters of Jamiat-ul Mujahideen,
a guerrilla group, were killed in another bout of ghting in the
Nowgam sectors forests. In late July the Indian army shot dead

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four HM militants, including two AJK residents, who were trying

to inltrate the LOC in Kupwara. In mid-August three LeT guerrillas were killed in an encounter in the Lolaab valley, during
which a SOG operative named Farid Khan was injured.61 Further
violence took place in the town of Sogam in the nal months
of 2002, including a bomb blast that killed six paramilitary troopers in October and the assassination of murdered minister
Mushtaq Lones brother, a surrendered former guerrilla leader, in
December.
On Indias independence day, 15 August 2002, Indian counterinsurgency authorities in Srinagar announced that 1,052 terrorists
had been eliminated between 1 January and 15 August 2002, compared with 1,059 during the corresponding period in 2001 (by 30
November 2002 the number of terrorists eliminated during the
year had climbed to 1,581). It was also disclosed that 1,012 AK ries,
1,179 kilograms of RDX and other explosive material, and 317
wireless sets had been recovered from JanuaryAugust 2002, compared with 880 AK ries, 651 kilograms of bomb-making material,
and 291 radios captured during JanuaryAugust 2001.62
The human tragedy of a dehumanized conict continues. The
Bakshi family live in Srinagars central Batamaloo district, a separatist stronghold. Of the familys three sons, one, Showkat, a pioneer JKLF militant, was in prison continuously from 1990 until
late 2002; another, Shakeel, a junior APHC leader, is also incarcerated; and the third, Shariq, lost his life ghting Indian forces. The
Bhat family are from Tral, an HM-inuenced town in the Valleys
south. The father, Mohammad Subhan Bhat, once a NC legislator,
was killed by guerrillas in 1991. One of his two sons, Showkat, was
also killed by guerrillas in 1994, and the other, Fayaz, a local government ofcer, was assassinated in late July 2002. Fayaz Bhat had

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been shortlisted by the NC as a possible party candidate from Tral

in IJK elections scheduled for the autumn of 2002. After his death,
Ghulam Hassan Jan, Tral zonal president of NC, became the
partys top prospective candidate. Jan had been living in Srinagar
for years because Tral was too unsafe. In early August 2002 he was
shot dead in central Srinagar. Trals previous NC zonal president
had also been assassinated. And Ghulam Hassan Jans younger
brother, Ghulam Nabi Jan, who in the mid-1990s began helping
security forces in anti-militancy operations in the Tral area, in the
late 1990s was killed along with twelve others [pro-India guerrillas] when militants blew up his vehicle in a IED blast.63

Lessons of Conict
The history of thirteen years of war in Kashmir suggests three
conclusions.
First, the policies of the Indian state have been crucial to the
eruption, spread, decline, and renewal of insurgency. The Pakistani states manipulative and malign interventions have also had
an important effect on the trajectory of conict, but the Indian
states role has been crucial to both the shaping of the internal
conict and its radicalization and trans-nationalization. According
to the gures of Indias own counterinsurgency command, in
the rst eight months of 1999 its forces killed 617 guerrillas, of
whom 167 were foreigners (27 percent) from outside IJK (the
foreigner count includes residents of AJK). During the rst eight
months of 2000, 941 guerrillas were slain, of whom 261 (28 percent) were such foreigners.64 This implies a local-to-foreigner
ratio of approximately 70 percent to 30 percent in guerrilla ranks.
The war in Kashmir, even in its dayeen phase, is not reducible
to simply a problem of cross-border terrorism and inltration

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fomented from and/or by Pakistan. The onus of any process to

develop a peaceful approach to the Kashmir conict thus falls primarily on India, and secondarily on Pakistan.
Second, the society and politics of IJK, the principal arena of
the conict, are remarkably complex. This is a richly diverse,
multi-textured society with matryoshka-doll layers of political complexity. A cacophony of intersecting and competing tunes, rather
than a single melody, is the result of this social and political plurality. The unitary-sounding categories of self-determination and
the Kashmiri people are overly simplistic when the self is in
fact differentiated, if not fractured, into multiple social groups and
contending political segments with very different aspirations. The
sources of the Kashmir conict are multiple, and require a sophisticated approach.
Third, the internal and international dimensions of the
Kashmir conict are inextricably entangled. This was the case in
1947, and remains the case in a different political context more
than half a century later. In November 2001 Professor Mohammad
Ibrahim, head of the conservative Jamaat-i-Islami party in Pakistans North-West Frontier Province, sat in the Hadiqat-ul-Uloom
madrasa (seminary) in Peshawar and ruminated on the struggle
in Kashmir after the defeat of the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan: We consider Kashmir part of Pakistan. Afghanistan was another country. I expect the Government of Pakistan to help the
Kashmiri people against Indian tyranny. Meanwhile, outside the
madrasa, Karamat Ullah, general secretary of Hizb-ul Mujahideen, was talking to young men sitting around the grounds or playing cricket. Many were recruits heading for training in Kashmir
courses of one month and three months are standardor were
coming or going from the war-zone. Karamat Ullah said that 500
to 600 members of his organization crossed the frontier dividing

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Indian and Pakistani forces in Kashmir every month, many rotating in or out in advance of winter closure of passes.65
In late July 2002 militant spokesmen in Pakistani Kashmirs
capital, Muzaffarabad, were admitting that in response to Indian
threats of war and American pressure, General Pervez
Musharraf s government had sharply curtailed their activities
in AJK. But, a HM source pointed out, we have many mobile
training camps in the hills and forests of [Indian] Kashmir where
youths are trained . . . [and] we have munitions stockpiled over the
years. The recent series of attacks on Indian forces [inside IJK] is
proof that we are capable of continuing our struggle.66 In late
August 2002 Sheikh Jameel-ur Rehman, general secretary of the
United Jihad Council, an alliance of over a dozen tanzeems active
in IJK, asserted that during the past thirteen years we have never
sought permission from Indian soldiers to cross the ceasere line
and we do not need permission from Pakistani soldiers either,
pointing out that the regions topography facilitates inltration
and exltration at many points of almost a thousand kilometers
of frontier740 kilometers of LOC and another 200 kilometers
of working boundary on Indian Jammus southwestern border
with Pakistan.67 The cross-border character of the Kashmir conict is therefore an inescapable reality. In the long run, the only
solution to cross-border violence lies in institutionalized ties of
cross-border cooperation.

SOVEREIGNTY IN DISPUTE

Kashmir is neither an integral part of India nor the jugular

vein of Pakistan, but a disputed territory which requires a
solution through talks. Kashmir belongs to all the residents
of the [pre-1948] undivided state [of Jammu and Kashmir].
g h u l a m m o h a m m e d s h a h,
former chief minister of IJK, July 2002

At its core, the Kashmir conict is a dispute

over sovereignty. It is a sovereignty dispute dened by the mutually reinforcing intersection of domestic and international
sources of conict. At the international level, sovereignty over the
territory and people of Jammu and Kashmir is disputed between
the states of India and Pakistan. The international dimension of
conict is complemented, and compounded, by sharply different
preferences on the sovereignty question within the contested territory. Inside Kashmir, the two state-centered claims to sovereignty
have a rival in a third conception of sovereignty, a construct of in-

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dependentist ideology, which argues that sovereignty resides in

neither New Delhi nor Islamabad but with the citizens of Jammu
and Kashmir. The crux of the contemporary Kashmir problem
is this three-way disagreement over the legitimate locus and unit
of sovereignty. For purposes of sovereignty, citizenship, and governance, are the legitimate borders India including its integral
part, Pakistan including its jugular vein, or an independent
Jammu and Kashmir separate from both countries? In their
maximalist versions, these claims are mutually exclusive. They
permit no space or scope for meaningful dialogue, let alone any
actual prospect of crafting a solution to the basic conict.
What ways exist of establishing the legitimate borders of political community? Suggested approaches seem many and varied on
supercial inspection, but practically all fall into one of two broad
categories: plebiscitary or partitionist. Both approachesand the
different variants of eachare hobbled by political tunnel vision
and underlying motivations of imposing the agenda of one of the
contending parties as a denitive solution to the dispute. Neither type of approach provides a viable basis for transcending the
internal and international antagonisms that cumulatively dene
the Kashmir stalemate. Both suffer from one or both of two salient aws: a xation on territory; and an unbending belief in the
absolute legitimacy of one of the three nationalist (in the case of
the Kashmir independentists, perhaps more accurately described
as quasi-nationalist) perspectives and the rejection of competing
perspectives as utterly illegitimate.

The Plebiscitary Approach

During the rst decade of the Kashmir dispute, the sovereignty
question was proposed to be settled in accordance with the will
of the people, expressed through the democratic method of a free

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and impartial plebiscite conducted under the auspices of the

United Nations. Between 1948 and 1957 the U.N.s Security Council repeatedly passed resolutions calling for such a process. A
United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP) was
established primarily to work with the two governments in organizing and administering a popular referendum to decide the key
question of rightful sovereignty over the contested territory, and
pending that exercise, a United Nations Military Observer Group
(UNMOGIP) was set up to monitor the truce along the ceasere
line dividing Jammu and Kashmir into Indian- and Pakistani-controlled zones. A half-century later, a skeletal UNMOGIP of fortyve ofcers still operates on the Line of Control, but its white
four-wheel-drive vehicles ying the blue standard of U.N. peacekeeping are a forlorn, less than token presence alongside hundreds
of thousands of heavily armed troops massed on either side of
the LOC. The promised plebiscite has long receded into distant
memory.
Of the parties to the Kashmir dispute, India alone dismisses the
plebiscite as irrelevant, obsolete, and unnecessary. Its foreign ministrys standard line is that the question of plebiscite in any part
of India, including Jammu and Kashmir, simply does not arise.
The people of Jammu and Kashmir have exercised their democratic rights repeatedly, as have people in other parts of India.1
This is a dubious stance. It appears to suggest that the people of
Indian Jammu and Kashmir (IJK) have freely and voluntarily consented to be part of the Indian Union through participation in Indian-sponsored political processes and representation in Indiansponsored institutions. The Security Council resolutionsnotably
those of March 1951 and January 1957are unequivocal that such
participation and representation could not be regarded as a substitute for an internationally supervised plebiscite. More important,

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the myth of freely and voluntarily given consent to Indian sovereignty is exploded by the appalling record of New Delhiinstigated subversion of democratic procedures and institutions and
abuse of democratic rights in IJK over more than fty years (recounted in Chapter 2). Indias leaders exploited Pakistans decision
to join U.S.-sponsored Cold War security pacts as a pretext to
openly renege on the plebiscite commitment as early as the mid1950s, despite Prime Minister Nehrus owery pledge . . . not
only to the people of Kashmir but to the world to hold such a
plebiscite.
That Indias dismissal of the plebiscite is fundamentally opportunistic does not, however, detract from the reality that after more
than fty years of conict, the plebiscite is indeed an obsolete
idea. U.N. Secretary-General Ko Annan admitted as much on a
visit to the subcontinent in 2000, when he described the decadesold Security Council resolutions on Kashmir as unenforceable and
essentially defunct. The United Nations does not deny that Kashmir is an unresolved international dispute, but its position is that it
can consider playing a role in either mediating or facilitating a settlement only if both India and Pakistan agree to its participation.
India is squarely opposed to such a role for the United Nations.
Since India is one of the parties to the conict, its absolute rejection of a plebiscite does render that option infeasibleeffectively
a non-option.
In contrast to India, both Pakistan and supporters of independent Kashmir continue to consider the plebiscite a relevant reference point. They do so motivated by subtly different considerations and agendas, however. For the state of Pakistan, the
revisionist power in the territorial dispute over Kashmir, the existence of unfullled U.N. resolutions on Kashmirunfullled, according to the Pakistani version, because of Indias prevarications

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and duplicitystill constitutes the main, if tenuous, basis in international law for Pakistans locus standi on Kashmir. Pakistani
leaders and diplomats thus routinely invoke Security Council
resolutions in ritual sparring with their Indian counterparts over
Kashmir, just as Indian ofcials tend to emphasize the legality
and nality of the maharajas October 1947 accession of J&K to
Indiathe linchpin of the Indian states legal claim to Kashmir
at every opportunity. (In practice, Pakistani leaders, including
General Musharraf, have indicated a willingness to pursue an intergovernmental peace process with India on Kashmir which is
not straitjacketed by formal pronouncements such as the declaratory commitment to the principle of plebiscite.) This is partly a
reexive instinct conditioned by lengthy habituation, and partly a
deliberate ploy intended to irritate the other country as much as
possible. The established positions of the two countries are also
somewhat ironic in light of history since it was originally India,
and not Pakistan, that internationalized the Kashmir question before the United Nations by complaining to the world body about
Pakistani-backed armed aggression to forcibly seize a territory
that had legally acceded to India.
The Pakistani states formal commitment to ascertaining the
will or aspirations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir,
through the implementation of U.N. Security Council resolutions,
tacitly restricts that choice to the two practical options of 1947
India or Pakistan. This state-centered, legalistic interpretation of
the right to self-determination is signicantly different from the
highly populist version articulated by proponents of an independent Kashmir. These proponentsa fractured and fractious collection of factions and personalities in both IJK and Pakistani-controlled Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK)seek to give voice to a
popularly based, largely inchoate but nonetheless resilient senti-

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ment that feels it has been systematically stied and denied by India and cruelly used and manipulated by Pakistan.
In historical terms, this ideology is descended from the Jacobin
conception of popular sovereignty coined by the National Conference in the 1940s (see Chapter 1), and it has a powerful resonance among a very large segment of J&Ks population, especially in the Kashmir Valley. In its pristine form, this alternative
conception of sovereignty is expressed in the text of a declaration
adopted by the independentist Jammu and Kashmir Liberation
Front ( JKLF) at a public meeting held in the AJK town of Mirpur
on 5 January 1995: Jammu & Kashmir State as it existed on 14 August 1947including Indian-occupied areas, Azad Kashmir, and
Gilgit and Baltistanis an indivisible political entity. No solution
not approved by a majority of the people of the entire State as a
single unit will be accepted.2 For adherents of this view, the preferred mechanism for resolving the sovereignty question is a referendum with three options on the ballotIndia, Pakistan, and an
independent, reunied state of Jammu and Kashmirthe outcome to be decided by a simple majority of the electorate.3
This view on the sovereignty conundrum and how it ought to
be resolved is more democratic than the two state-sponsored versions, for it at least vests the right to decide squarely in the people
of Kashmir. It is, however, infeasible as a political agenda because
India is against a plebiscite in principle, while Pakistans advocacy
of U.N. resolutions appears to be a tactical device deployed in
wrangling with India, rather than indicative of a genuine commitment. In any case, Pakistan is at least as hostile as India to the concept of an independent Kashmir, as manifested in its treatment
of independentist groups in AJK and the Northern Areas and in
the concerted attempts by the Pakistani military and its intelligence agencies to turn the independentist uprising in IJK into a

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movement dominated by pro-Pakistan elements (see Chapter 3).

Although a referendum on sovereignty is a historically legitimate
idea, the reality is that India would never agree to any kind of
plebiscite, while Pakistan would like any such exercise to be conducted on its original termsthat is, excluding the third option
of independence. In the mid-1990s in Srinagar, Syed Ali Shah
Geelani, a prominent conservative Islamist in the Valley and the
Hurriyat Conferences senior pro-Pakistan member, told me that
a choice between independence and Pakistan would confuse and
severely divide the Muslims of J&K, and he was probably correct.
The dogged advocates of the plebiscitary vision of independent Kashmir are generally aware of the hopelessness of their
cause. But they persist in asserting their case at a declaratory level,
for two reasons. First, this vision, however hopeless in practical
terms, has immense romantic appeal and hence a certain political
currency among a large segment of Jammu and Kashmirs population, not just in IJK but in AJK as well. In 1989 members of the
Kashmir Liberation Cell, a research body supported by the Pakistan and AJK governments, presented an American scholar visiting Pakistani Kashmir with maps depicting the entire pre-1948
princely state and asserted with some fervor that this is what
Jammu and Kashmir was before and will be again when we are independent. The scholar rightly concluded that it is not only India that has cause for concern about the future of its relationship
with Kashmir.4
The urge to azaadi (freedom) and khudmukhtari (self-rule) has a
long and distinguished historical lineage, associated with the politics of the National Conference in the 1940s, the Plebiscite Front
between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s, the Peoples League in
the 1980s, and the JKLF in the 1990s. The forms of struggle have
varied over time, but in one form or another this tenacious urge

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has dened politics in Kashmir for the past six decades. The evidence suggests that it can be suppressed but not extinguished.
Even if the demand for a plebiscite and the goal of an independent, reunied Kashmir are politically unrealizable aims, an honorable accommodation of the urge to azaadi and khudmukhtari is
essential to any framework for democratically resolving the Kashmir question. That is the second reason why die-hard independentists such as the young JKLF leader Yasin Malik persist in articulating the maximalist argument for self-determination. They
feel they owe it to their political forebears, their people, and their
martyrs not to allow this important element in Kashmirs political life to be marginalized and destroyed by state-led authoritarianism.
The independentist vision is, however, potentially as intolerant
as the repressive state-led nationalisms it opposes. In an uncanny
replication of Indian and Pakistani ofcial nationalismswhich
in their maximalist versions claim Kashmir to be atoot ang (integral part) and shah rag (jugular vein) of their respective statesindependentists also subscribe to an idealized sacred geography, the
territory of the pre-1948 princely state of Jammu and Kashmir.
That state existed under British imperial power for barely a
century (18461947) and cobbled together diverse regions and ethnic and religious communities under a despotic, semi-feudal monarchy (see Chapter 1). It is not at all clear why a territory with a
relatively brief and distinctly undistinguished genealogy of statehood should be elevated to a sacrosanct status. Such an ideological doctrine smacks of the same syndromefetishization of
territorial integrity and a rigid, monolithic conception of sovereigntycharacteristic of state-led nationalist stances on the Kashmir question.
The aw inherent in the independentist perspectiveand in

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the mechanism proposed for its actualization, the plebiscite decided by majority voteis all the more acute because Jammu and
Kashmir is a territory fractured along the most fundamental and
intractable of fault lines: national identity and state allegiance.
The Indian and Pakistani states and the independentist tendency
each have the allegiance of segments of the population. On the
smaller, less populous Pakistani side of the LOC, the population is
divided among those strongly loyal to Pakistani nationalism and
the Pakistani state and those who support independentist or at
least autonomist politics. In IJK, two national identities (Indian
and Pakistani) and one quasi-national identity (Kashmiri independentist), and the three accompanying political orientations, exist
with mutually incompatible notions of the meaning of self-determination.
The plebiscitary formula is blind to the matryoshka-doll complexity of political allegiances in IJK. In a hypothetical referendum, the Kashmir Valley would probably return a strong proindependence majority, but even in this region, a signicant
minority consisting of Hindu (the Pandits) as well as Muslim citizens (especially the Gujjar and Shia minorities) would vote for India, while another sizeable minority of Muslim citizens would
vote for Pakistan. The Jammu region, whose population is almost
two-thirds Hindu, would probably produce a strong pro-India majority overall, but Muslim-dominated districts within the region
(Doda, Rajouri, Poonch) might well vote differently or at least return a more mixed verdict, while predominantly non-Muslim enclaves within these Muslim-majority districts (such as the towns
of Rajouri and Poonch and the town of Bhaderwah in Doda district, all of which are dominated by Hindus plus Sikhs) would
probably vote differently from the rest of their areas. Self-determination for the Kashmiri people sounds distinctly unitary,

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while the reality is an extremely plural society where the self is

fractured on the most basic questions of identity and allegiance.
In such a complex situation, a plebiscitary approach is not just
deeply simplistic and inadequate but, potentially, deeply destabilizing. In IJK, the crucial arena of the Kashmir problem, any
attempt to impose one of the three perspectives on sovereignty on
the other two segments of the population is a recipe for conict,
repression, and violence, as the past and present of authoritarian
Indian policy in IJK clearly reveals. A majoritarian plebiscite, the
most direct method of settling a sovereignty question, is by its
very nature a winner-take-all mechanism. It has been pointed out
that such referenda cannot measure intensities of belief and
preclude working things out through discussion.5 In a deeply
volatile context such as Kashmirs, where different segments of
the population hold intense, sharply conicting beliefs about the
legitimate borders of sovereign authority, a plebiscitary approach
is bound to have inammatory, polarizing consequences. In fact,
it is more than likely to herald a short countdown to all-out civil
war.
The sovereignty dispute that led to bitter civil war in Bosnia
and Herzegovina (BiH) from 1992 to 1995 had a conguration similar to that of the problem in Kashmir. When the federal state of
Yugoslavia, of which BiH was one of six units, disintegrated in
1991 as Croatia and Slovenia seceded, the political future of Bosnia
became an open and explosive question. Among Yugoslavias
units, BiH had by far the most mixed, multinational population
its 4.4 million people approximately 45 percent Bosniac (Bosnian
Muslim), 35 percent Bosnian Serb, and 18 percent Bosnian Croat.
Broadly speaking, most Bosnian Serbs wanted BiH to remain
within a shrunken, Serbia-dominated Yugoslav union, while most
Bosnian Muslims increasingly favored a sovereign Bosnian state.

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The third community, the Bosnian Croats, were also by and large
against Bosnia remaining within a rump Yugoslavia dominated by
Serbia, and were increasingly inuenced by the virulent nationalist politics of newly independent Croatia, whose secession from
Yugoslavia in mid-1991 sparked an armed revolt by Croatias own
Serb minority. At the urging of an arbitration commission established by the European Union (EU) to deal with the conicting
claims to self-determination that arose with the unraveling of
Yugoslavia, a referendum on sovereignty was organized in BiH on
29 February and 1 March 1992. Sixty-three percent of the eligible
electorate participated, and 98 percent of these voters supported
the independence option.
There were a couple of deadly problems with this apparently
straightforward outcome. First, the referendum was massively
boycotted by Bosnian Serbs, who disagreed strongly with its very
premise. But the referendum nonetheless provided the basis for
international recognition of Bosnias independent status in early
April 1992. Within weeks the radicalized Bosnian Serbs launched
a large-scale military campaign to seize control of as much of
BiH as possible, with the moral and material support of the government of Serbia and the by then largely Serb-controlled army
of federal Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav Peoples Army. In the summer
of 1992 BiH descended into full-edged civil war, as Bosnian Serb
forces ruthlessly overran two-thirds of the newly independent
state in a matter of months, ethnically cleansing hundreds of
thousands of Muslims and Croats from these territories, and besieged the capital, Sarajevo.
The second problem became evident by early 1993. Most
Bosnian Croats had voted for independence not because of a commitment shared with Muslims to a united state of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, but as a tactical move to ensure that BiH would be

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separated from what remained of the Yugoslav federation after

the departure of Slovenia and Croatia. The Muslim-Croat alliance
which won the referendum in 1992 dissolved chaotically during
the rst few months of 1993. It became clear that Bosnian Croat
nationalists had viewed that alliance in purely tactical terms, as
a stepping-stone to their own vision of a Greater Croatia which
would include sizeable Croat-populated regions of BiH. By April
May 1993 Bosnian Croat forces, with the full backing of the aggressively nationalist government of Croatia and its army,
launched their own land-grab and expulsion campaign in certain
regions of BiH, engulng those regions in bitter warfare with
Muslim forces. By the end of 1993 BiH had been effectively partitioned by war into three zones of military control and three
national(ist) statelets. The sovereignty plebiscite had unleashed a
series of events culminating in bloody partition. There are parallels with Kashmir here. Like Bosnia, Kashmir has three national/
quasi-national identities and three rival allegiances/preferences on
the sovereignty issue on the same territory. As in Kashmir, the internal Bosnian conict was severely compounded by the external
regional/international dimension, which involved two larger and
aggressively nationalist neighboring states (Serbia-Montenegro
and Croatia), both with territorial interests and strongly motivated groups of co-nationals in Bosnia and Herzegovina.6
The Bosnian case suggests that a plebiscitary approach is not
just inappropriate but positively dangerous for Kashmir, which
is also the site of a complex and volatile sovereignty dispute with
inseparable internal and international dimensions. The complexity and sensitivity of the Kashmir problem call for tools of surgical precision, not the blunt instrument of plebiscitary majoritarianism. A plebiscitary approach guarantees a winner-take-all
outcome. This has the inevitable effect of inaming and sharpen-

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ing the fundamental conict over the legitimate unit and locus of
sovereignty.
Even in societies where the potential for violence is not as pronounced as in Bosnia or Kashmir, plebiscites have a polarizing
effect. In October 1995 an independence referendum in Quebec
was defeated by the narrowest of margins, 50.4 percent to 49.6
percent. Almost 60 percent of Quebecs Francophone majority
(who make up 80 percent of the total population) voted for secession from Canada, and they were barely thwarted by the no
vote cast by the very large anti-independence minority among
the Francophones and the 20 percent of Quebecers who are
Anglophone or members of the Native American communities.
Prior to the referendum, the Native American groups who inhabit
vast, sparsely populated tracts of northern Quebec held parallel referendamuch like the Serb communities of Croatia and
Bosnia in 19911992and overwhelmingly afrmed their desire to
remain in a united Canada. A very volatile situation would have
ensued had the outcome of the referendum been exactly the reverse50.4 percent in favor of independence, 49.6 percent against
(a difference of fewer than fty thousand votes). Half the citizenry would then have triumphantly celebrated the dawn of
freedom, while the other half would have felt insecure and quite
possibly furious at the prospect of a change in sovereignty against
their will.
In a society divided along the crucial fault line of national identity and state allegiance which is also the subject of an inter-state
sovereignty dispute, the basic thrust of peace-building must be not
to further iname and polarize, but to devise a framework that
can turn the competing, mutually antagonistic political logics of
the contending parties into a positive-sum game. In Northern Ireland, a good example of such a society, the peace process based on

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the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998 has sought to implement precisely such a broadly based, accommodative settlement.
The Northern Ireland model involves three key elements: devolution of power from London to Belfast; a broadly inclusive, powersharing regime in Northern Ireland with equal representation in
government for parties representing the pro-British (Unionist) and
pro-Irish (Nationalist) communities; and cross-border institutional
arrangements linking Northern Ireland, which remains under
British sovereignty, with the Republic of Ireland. This multidimensional solution to a centuries-old intractable conict has been enabled and is reinforced by the developing confederalization of Europe under the aegis of the EU, which both the United Kingdom
and the Republic of Ireland joined in the early 1970s.
The Good Friday agreement has retained one potentially troublesome plebiscitary provision, however. It stipulates that British
sovereignty over Northern Ireland will not yield to Irish sovereignty (that is, a unied Ireland) unless and until a majority in
Northern Ireland ratify such a change in a referendum. This effectively puts the prospect of such a change in cold storage for some
years to come, since demographic projections show that the proBritish Protestant population will continue to be a thin majority
of Northern Irelands population for at least another decade. If
the pro-unication Catholic population becomes the majority in
Northern Ireland, nonetheless, a sovereignty change effected via
majoritarian plebiscite will still be rife with inammatory possibilities in a society which continues to be fractured on the basic fault
line of national identity and state allegiance.
Ultimately, a consideration of the plebiscitary approach provides a compelling lesson on how not to go about attempting to
untangle a complex sovereignty dispute in and over a territory
such as Jammu and Kashmir.

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The Partitionist Approach

The partitionist approach to resolving the Kashmir conict comes
in a variety of forms and from diverse quarters. In a way, the
partitionist approach represents the logical opposite of the plebiscitary approach. The plebiscitary approach is either in denial
of or insufciently sensitive to the complexity of political allegiances and preferences on the disputed territory. The partitionist
approach seeks to respond to such complexities by drawing or redrawing the borders of political community and sovereignty in
ways that are claimed to be more conducive to prospects of peace
and stability. In fact, the partitionist proposals fall far short of that
promise. They tend to be unviable in practical terms, and dangerous in that they threaten to aggravate rather than resolve conict.
The simplest variant of this approach is the idea of converting
the Line of Control that divides the Indian and Pakistani parts of
Jammu and Kashmir into a de jure international border between
the two countries. The LOC, which originated in January 1949 as a
ceasere line between the Indian and Pakistani armies at the end
of their rst war over Kashmir, shifted only slightly in subsequent
military conicts in 1965 and 1971, and was renamed the Line of
Controlto be respected by both sides without prejudice to the
recognized position [on the Kashmir dispute] of either sideby
the Simla Agreement concluded between the leaders of the two
countries in 1972. The larger and signicantly more populous part
of Jammu and Kashmir lies on the Indian side of the LOC, making India the status quo power in the Kashmir dispute and Pakistan the revisionist power. For decades, Indian leaders have sought
to convert the border drawn in blood through Jammu and Kashmir in 19471948 into a legal, permanent international frontier. As
discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, Indias prime minister Nehru sug-

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gested such a solution to his Pakistani counterpart in the mid1950s, and indeed may have rst broached the subject as early as
late 1948. Pakistani leaders from Liaquat Ali Khan to Mohammed
Ali Bogra to Pervez Musharraf have always rejected the suggestion vehemently. In the autumn of 2002, asked whether he was
amenable to dividing Jammu and Kashmir along the Line of Control, Musharraf tersely replied: Main bewkoof nahin hoon [I am
not an idiot].7
Converting the LOC into the juridical boundary between India
and Pakistan is not the ofcial Indian stand on the Kashmir dispute. Formally, India claims the entire territory of the pre-1948
princely state of Jammu and Kashmir and refers to the portion beyond the Line of Control as Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, which
it claims rightfully belongs to India under the instrument of accession signed by the maharaja of Kashmir in late 1947. For practical
purposes, however, ofcial India harbors no illusions about the
possibility of recovering these territories, and would ideally like
the de facto territorial status quo to be given the stamp of permanent, juridical legitimacy.8
This Indian stance is at once astonishingly nave and cynically
unconstructive. No Pakistani regime or leader can or will accept
turning the LOC into part of the India-Pakistan border as the
starting point or dening element of a political dialogue with India on Kashmir, since such acceptance would preempt the basis of
the international dispute over Kashmir on Indias preferred terms.
Without the agreement of Pakistanthe party on the other side
of the fence, quite literallyno stabilization of or change to the
LOCs status is possible. The LOC is without doubt one of the
most important and difcult issues in the Kashmir conict, but it
is appropriately the subject of nal-status talks, at an advanced
stage of a comprehensive, multidimensional peace process.

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I believe that either redrawing or erasing the LOC is not only

practically impossible but unnecessary as well as undesirable for a
democratic compromise on Kashmiralthough the de facto borders meaning and character would need to be redened, and the
line itself probably renamed, as part of such a compromise. However, ofcial Indias inordinate interest in sealing the LOC as the
de jure international frontier amounts to putting the cart before
the horsein the absence of any apparent willingness on Indias
part to meaningfully engage the multiple dimensions of the Kashmir problem at either internal or international levelsand smacks
of a tactic intended to eliminate the possibility of any meaningful
dialogue on the Kashmir question. As an opening gambit, the Indian perspective on the LOC is unacceptable not just to Pakistan
but to several million people in IJK, supplemented by a sizeable
number in AJK, who favor an independent Kashmir. Permanently
partitioning Kashmir along the LOC would do nothing to address
Indias core problem in IJKthe existence of very large numbers
of citizens who do not accept the legitimacy of Indian sovereignty
over their lives and land. Ofcial Indias apparent preoccupation
with the LOC reveals that its perspective on the Kashmir conict
is narrowly xated on territorial control. This is a recipe for international stalemate and continued internal conict, not peace.
If Indias myopic status quo partitionism is destructive to prospects of moving toward peace in Kashmir, so is any brand of revisionist partitionism that may enjoy currency in Pakistan. It is difcult to cite hard evidence for the latter type of agenda, which is
practically never expressed publicly or explicitly. However, there
is a widespread perception in India, shared by some observers
in Western countries, that elements of the Pakistani elite would
really prefer a redrawing of the LOC in a way that is, in a Pakistani view, more balanced and fairer to Pakistan. For example, the

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Kashmir Valley, with its overwhelming Muslim majority, could

become part of Pakistan, in exchange for which Pakistan might
withdraw any claim on the rest of IJK, including substantial Muslim-majority areas in the Jammu region and in Ladakh (the Kargil
district). This variant of partitionism, driven by irredentist motives of territorial aggrandizement, is utterly bankrupt and fantastic. The Indian state cannot and will not cede any part of IJK,
including (indeed perhaps especially) the Valley, to Pakistan.
Moreover, the bulk of the Valleys population is attached to the
idea of independence, not integration into Pakistan, and although
pro-azaadi feelings are especially deep-rooted and widespread in
the Valley, a minority of the Valleys Muslims (and, of course, its
small Hindu minority) continue to identify with India. The Kashmir banega Pakistan (Kashmir will become Pakistan) ideology has
resonance with only one of three segments, also a minority, of the
Valleys population. Revisionist partitionism of the kind just described is thus doubly untenable. It is unacceptable to the Indian
state, and it is not consistent with the rst-order preferences of
most people in the Valley, the most coveted real estate in Kashmir.
In 20012002 the leader of Pakistans military regime on more
than one occasion outlined his vision of a South Asian peace process: The rst step should be the resumption of peaceful dialogue. The second should be to accept Kashmir as a central issue.
The third is to negate any solution that is not acceptable to both
the countries. The fourth is to apply what remains of a solution
according to the wishes of Kashmiris.9 Although this is a somewhat simple, even glib statement, it has its positive points. The
characterization of Kashmir as a central issue, rather than the
core issue of India-Pakistan relations (the preferred Pakistani terminology), appears to be an attempt to assuage Indian complaints
about an alleged Pakistani xation on Kashmir. The third ele-

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menta frank recognition that any solution will have to be a

compromise between contending maximalist ambitionsis genuinely promising. Taken at face value, it effectively eliminates a
number of so-called solutions from the slate, including the chimerical prospect of any negotiated repartition of Kashmir that
would involve revision of borders and a transfer of some areas
from de facto Indian sovereignty to de facto Pakistani sovereignty.
Alternative partitionist formulas are equally untenable. The
idea of making the Valleythe region of J&K where support for
self-determination is most developed and widespreada fully
sovereign unit has been bandied about from time to time.10 This
sort of proposal is not feasible, since it would be seen as an intolerable loss of territorial integrity and sovereignty by Indian state
elites and the vast majority of the Indian public, and a fully sovereign authority in any part of the disputed territory would probably not be regarded as acceptable by Pakistani elites either. But
there are other problems as well. A sovereign Kashmir Valley
would include a signicant minority of Muslims whose basic
loyalty is to Pakistan, and another sizeable minority of Hindus,
Sikhs, and Muslims (especially among the Valleys minority Shia
Muslims and ethnic Gujjars) whose national identity is ultimately
with India. The pro-India group would be likely to see themselves as orphans of secession, and would probably migrate permanently from their homeland rather than put up with such a
solution.11 The pro-Pakistan segment would perhaps see such an
outcome as merely a stepping-stone to a merger with Pakistan,
somewhat like the nationalist Croats of Bosnia and Herzegovina
during the Bosnian war.
A sovereign Kashmir Valley would thus not only include groups
who consider their fundamental rights violated, indeed negated,
but also exclude people who identify or sympathize with the inde-

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pendentist agenda. For example, a pro-independence population

exists among the Kashmiri-speaking Muslims of Doda district (as
does a pro-Pakistan element), in the Jammu region, and to a lesser
extent possibly also in other Muslim-dominated areas of Jammu
like Rajouri, Poonch, and highland areas of Udhampur district. An
independent Kashmir Valley would thus create stranded communities both within and without, because of the matryoshka-doll
complexity of political allegiances, a problem that can only be
solved through large-scale population transfers. That situation
would carry a high potential for sectarian violence and reciprocal
expulsions in numerous locales, which could lead to a much bigger conagration involving India and Pakistan. If the Pakistanicontrolled AJK districts across the LOC from IJK were not included in any sovereign entity centered on the Kashmir Valley, a
sizeable pro-independence population in AJK would be left out.
However, if these districts were included, a possibly even larger
population in AJK whose basic allegiance is to Pakistan would
have to become unwilling citizens of a sovereign entity dominated
demographically and politically by Valley Kashmiris whose spoken language (Kashmiri not Punjabi) and political traditions are
very different from those of AJK.
Solutions premised primarily on a territorial xation are not
just infeasible given the constraints of realpolitik and the entrenched interests of states, but also are unviable because of the
sheer complexity and multi-layered differentiation of political allegiances in Kashmir. Another example of such a misguided solution is that of a U.S.-based group nanced by a wealthy KashmiriAmerican businessman and consisting mainly of retired American
diplomats and academics. This group has published a document
which recommend[s] that a portion of the former princely state
of Jammu and Kashmir be reconstituted as a sovereign entity.12

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The document does not precisely specify the intended portion.

However, during an invitation-only conference at a university in
the United States that I attended in May 2000, the groups sponsor
circulated maps specifying the area in question, which encompassed the Kashmir Valley, all of Poonch district in IJKs Jammu
region, most of Rajouri district, all of Doda district, parts of
Udhampur district, and all of the Kargil district in Ladakh. According to the plan presented, this area would either be one of
two sovereign Kashmir entities, the other being Pakistani-controlled AJK, or, preferably, the greater part of a single, amalgamated entity including the AJK districts.
This proposal shares the crippling problems of territorially
xated, partitionist ideas in general. In addition, the attempt to expand the boundaries of the sovereign entity beyond the core
area of the Kashmir Valleywhich is itself not as socially and
politically homogeneous as the proposal presumesto cover certain Jammu and Ladakh districts renders it even more precarious.
These areas of Jammu and Ladakh are included in the territory
of the putative sovereign state apparently on the grounds that
they are predominantly Muslim, Kashmiri-speaking, or both. The
social and political realities are innitely more complicated. The
Kargil district of Ladakh is indeed populated mainly by Shia Muslims, but its social history and political dynamics are distinct from
those of the Valley. The cry for self-determination, which has a
huge popular base in the Valley, does not have discernible support in Kargil. Unlike the Valleys Kashmiri-speaking population,
the Muslim communities of the Jammu regions war-torn border
districts of Rajouri and Poonch (see Chapter 3) belong mostly to
non-Kashmiri-speaking ethnic groups like Rajputs, Gujjars and
Bakerwals, and Pathans, and have ethnolinguistic, geographic,
and political distance from the Valley. Their allegiances cannot

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be taken for granted by Indians, Pakistanis, or Kashmir independentists. Moreover, signicant non-Muslim minorities live in
Rajouri-Poonch. The towns of Rajouri and Poonch (unlike the
districts as a whole) are dominated by Hindus together with a
considerable sprinkling of Sikhs.
The Muslim majority in the Jammu regions Doda district are
principally Kashmiri speakers who share an ethnic identity and
close political afnities with the Valley. However, Muslims are
only 57 percent of Doda districts population. The other 43 percent consists of Hindus together with some Sikhs. Of the three
towns in the district, Doda has a Kashmiri-speaking Muslim majority (and a sizeable Hindu minority), Bhaderwah has a majority
of Hindus (and a large Muslim minority), and Kishtwars population is evenly split between Muslims and non-Muslims, principally
Hindus.
The scenic and historic mountain town of Kishtwar is in a way
a microcosm of the complexity of the Kashmir problem. Its rugged hinterland, dotted with remote villages (some Hindu, some
Muslim), is a major theater of war between Indias army and paramilitary forces and tenacious guerrilla formations, whose ghters
are mostly locally recruited young men intermixed with a signicant foreign jehadi element. One of the rst massacres of
Hindu civilians in Kashmir took place on a mountain road near
the town in August 1993, when a local bus was stopped by gunmen and sixteen Hindu passengers lined up and shot dead. Despite such provocations, the president of the Doda district unit of
the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a resident of
Kishtwar town, told me in 1995 that locals belonging to different confessional communities still had a degree of tolerance and
respect for each other. He indicated that this was both a tradition and a practical compulsion, given the towns population mix.

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However, a conversation with him in the garden of the local dak

bungalow (rest house), followed by an interview with the pro-independence imam (chief preacher) of the towns ornate mosque and
a cross-section of Muslim citizens in a house on one of the winding lanes of the Muslim residential quarter, made it amply clear to
me that this town was a powder kegdeeply divided in fundamental political allegiances and preferences. As I returned to the
dak bungalow for the night, I passed rows of Muslim and Hindu
shops standing cheek by jowl on the dusty main street, already eerily deserted because the nightly curfew was about to begin.
The example of Kishtwar illustrates particularly vividly why
both plebiscitary and partitionist approachesboth xated on territory and premised on a belief in the absolute legitimacy of one
view of self-determination to the exclusion of its competitors
are deeply inappropriate ways of dealing with the Kashmir problem. In February 2002 unidentied militants appeared near the
dak bungalow in Kishtwar and hurled a grenade at the security
picket guarding the bungalow. However, the grenade missed its
target and exploded on the main street. One person was killed
a Muslim citizen. Of the thirteen other civilians seriously injured
in the blast, six were Muslim and seven Hindu.13 The future of
Kishtwarand of Kashmirdepends on devising a framework
that can accommodate, however uneasily, the various contending
preferences on sovereignty and self-determination. Plebiscitary
and partitionist approaches both fundamentally violate the logic
of that essential goal.
Yet another variant of partitionism is articulated by sectarian
Hindu groups on the extreme right wing of Indian politics. Although their perspective on the Kashmir problem has remained
essentially constant over more than ve decades, their views have
assumed greater importance than before because of the move of

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right-wing Hindu sectarianism from the margins to the center

stage of Indian politics since 1990.14 During 2002 the Vishwa
Hindu Parishad (VHP, World Hindu Council), a zealot organization which has a worldwide network, adopted the following
stance on Kashmir:
VHP on Sunday demanded division of [Indian] Jammu
& Kashmir into four parts including a separate enclave
with union territory [that is, administered directly from
New Delhi] status for resettling migrant Kashmiri
Pandits [in the Kashmir Valley]. Alleging neglect, discrimination, injustice and deeply rooted bias against
Jammu and Ladakh by successive regimes in Srinagar,
VHPs central board demanded carving out of a separate state [of the Indian Union] comprising Jammu,
Kathua, Udhampur, Doda, Poonch, and Rajouri. The
resolution on Kashmir passed at the meeting [also] demanded partition of the Kashmir Valley and the creation of a union territory for resettling Kashmiri
Pandits in the area north-east of the Jhelum river. The
VHP also demanded union territory status for Ladakh,
and immediate abrogation of Article 370 of the [Indian]
Constitution which provides special status [a regime autonomous of New Delhi] to the state [of IJK].15

Following this declaration, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

(RSS, National Volunteer Organization), which is the ideological
and organizational core of Indias Hindu sectarian movement,
also took up the agenda of partitioning Indian-controlled Jammu
and Kashmir: Close on the heels of the VHP demand for division of Jammu & Kashmir into four parts, the RSS today sought
trifurcation of the statecarving out Kashmir Valley and Jammu

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as separate states and Ladakh as a union territory. The resolution of the RSS national executive also demanded abrogation of
Article 370.16
The VHP and RSS demands were rejected by Indias BJP interior minister and deputy prime minister, L. K. Advani, a hardline right-wing politician with close connections to the RSS. The
minister and his partys spokesman both asserted that they favored maintaining the status quo in IJK.17 Nonetheless, a reporter
for the Indian Express astutely observed that the Hindu sectarian
movement has now neatly put forward three faces on [Indian]
Jammu & KashmirBJP the moderate, RSS the hard-line and
VHP the extremetailored to the requirements and constituency
of each outt. Indeed, the RSS launched a campaign based in
Jammu city on the trifurcation and statehood for Jammu platform, in partnership with the Jammu BJP, to coincide with the
run-up to elections to the IJK legislature in the autumn of 2002.
Advanis denial in Delhi notwithstanding, the IJK BJP units manifesto for these elections pledged to abrogate Article 370 and to detach Ladakh from IJK and make it a union territory.18
As it turned out, RSS-BJP candidates campaigning in the Jammu
region on the trifurcation and separation of Jammu from
Kashmir planks fared disastrously in the elections, consistent
with a historical pattern in which the BJP and its predecessor parties have never been able to win more than marginal support
among the Jammu regions Hindu electorate. In a debacle for
the extreme rights agenda, only one such candidate was elected
among the Jammu regions thirty-seven deputies to the IJK assembly. In Ladakhs Buddhist-dominated Leh district, RSS emissaries
persuaded the leaders of the Buddhist community (who are of
Tibetan ethnic stock) to form a Ladakh Union Territory Front,

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which subsequently won Leh districts two seats in the eightyseven-member IJK assembly unopposed.19
This particular partitionist agenda is premised on an absolute
denial that any unresolved sovereignty issue exists in Jammu
and Kashmir, at either the internal or the international level. In
this view, the Kashmir problem exists because IJKs integration
with Hindu-majority India has been disrupted by pseudo-secular New Delhi governments misguided policy of appeasement
of IJKs Muslim majority, particularly the overwhelmingly Muslim
population of the Kashmir Valleyexemplied above all by Article 370 of the Indian constitution, the IJK autonomy statute. This
argument has long had currency in sectarian Hindu politics both
in IJK and in India proper. The demand for trifurcation of IJK
to enable self-determination for Hindu Jammu and Buddhist
Ladakh has its origins in the early 1950s, in the agitation against
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullahs government by the Praja Parishad
(see Chapter 2), the progenitor of Hindu reaction in urban
Jammu. Abolition of Article 370, viewed as a blight on the organic
unity of India, has been one of the sacred shibboleths of the BJP
during its long years as a minor opposition party in Indian politics.
The demand for a separate, Pandits-only enclave in the Kashmir
Valley is more recent but still over a decade old. In the formulation of one Pandit organization, this enclave, sanitized of Muslims, would cover 55 percent of the Valleys land area (8,600 of
15,853 square kilometers) and include four of its ve largest
townsSrinagar, Baramulla, Anantnag, and Sopore.20 Pandits, including displaced persons, make up 4 percent of the Kashmir Valleys population.
The partitionist posture of Indias far right is based on a host of
myths, misrepresentations, and distortions. Article 370 could not

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possibly have engendered secessionism in Kashmir because IJKs

autonomous regime was drastically eroded by central intervention from New Delhi beginning in the mid-1950s and practically
ceased to exist in all but name by the mid-1960s (see Chapter 2).
The argument that the grant of autonomous status served as the
thin end of the secessionist wedge is therefore baseless. To the
contrary, liquidation of IJKs autonomous regime through authoritarian central intervention led to the entrenchment of secessionist
longings, particularly in the Kashmir Valley. The people of the
Kashmir Valley have by and large been disenfranchised citizens of
the Indian Union since the 1950swith rare semi-democratic interludes and exceptionsruled either through unrepresentative
client governments foisted on Srinagar by New Delhis manipulation or through overt use of police methods and military repression (or, more commonly, a variable mix of manipulation and repression).
Any grievances regarding inequitable treatment or marginalization that exist among certain segments in the Jammu and
Ladakh regions cannot therefore be blamed on the people of the
Kashmir Valley. The voices of extreme Hindu communalism and
reaction in Jammu, while consistently vocal and encouraged by
patrons in India proper, have moreover never been able to demonstrate anything resembling mass support among the overall Hindu
majority in IJKs Jammu region. The demand for partition of the
Valley to create a Pandits-only area is simply bizarre, and at odds
with the complex picture of Pandit-Muslim coexistence and conict in the Valley before, during, and after the watershed year
of 1990.
The kind of internal partition of IJK favored by Indias far right
is probably illegal under international law, given J&Ks status as a
disputed territory, and probably also under Indias own constitu-

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tion, given the continuing presence of Article 370, even if only on

paper, in that document. The prescription is also at variance with
social and political realities on the ground in the Jammu and
Ladakh regions of IJK. As noted earlier, three and a half of the
Jammu regions six districtsDoda, Rajouri, Poonch, and parts
of Udhampurhave majority Muslim populations. The Jammu
region as a whole has a Hindu majority because the Muslimmajority areas, largely rural and mountainous, are more thinly
inhabited than the plains and foothills dominated by Hindu populations. The RSS-inspired agenda of partitioning IJK to carve out
a Hindu-majority Jammu is unacceptable to the Muslims of
Rajouri, Poonch, Doda, and the Udhampur uplands, not just to
their pro-independence and pro-Pakistan elements but also to
those reconciled to Indian rule. It is a recipe for inammation of
communal divides in volatile, confessionally mixed locales like
Rajouri and Kishtwar (besides, even the city of Jammu, which is
solidly Hindu-dominated, has a sizeable Muslim minority population). It was pointed out as early as the 1960s by a seasoned observer of Kashmir politics, a Kashmiri Pandit from the Valley, that
the proposed separation of Jammu cannot be effected in the
manner its sponsors fondly hope. The Muslims living in the districts of Doda and Poonch, where they are the majority, will almost certainly refuse to be bracketed with the Dogra Hindus and
prefer to stay with the Valleys Muslims.21 The same situation
persists today. Faced with such a prospect, Jammus Muslim communities are likely to forge a common front overriding internal
ethnolinguistic and political differences, and to insist on remaining
connected to their fellow Muslims in the Valley.
Like Jammu, Ladakh is a heterogeneous region and does not
have a unitary regional personality. For several decades, Buddhists,
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of the sparsely populated high-altitude regions mixed BuddhistMuslim population. Census results from 2001 reveal that the demographic balance has shifted slightly but signicantly, so that
Ladakhs population of 250,000 now has a thin Muslim majority
of 52 percent. Ladakhs Kargil district is almost 85 percent Muslim,
principally adherents of the Shia version of the faith. The Leh district is over 80 percent Buddhist, the main minority being a Muslim community called Arghuns, descendants of Sunni Muslims
who migrated to Leh from the Kashmir Valley in the seventeenth
century and intermarried with local ethnic Tibetans.
In August 2002 it was reported that while the trifurcation demand of the RSS may have sent a wave of optimism through the
Ladakh Buddhist Association (LBA) which is spearheading the
campaign for a union territory in Leh, opposition is gaining
ground in Kargil. In response to the trifurcation campaign, an allparty meeting was held in Kargil, and those attending the meeting unanimously opposed any division of the state [of IJK].
Asghar Karbalai, vice president of the Imam Khomeini Trust,
Kargils premier religious body, asserted: We strongly condemn
the RSS and VHP move and whatever be the solution to the Kashmir dispute, we will always go with the [Muslim] majority in the
state. In fact, we want unication of Gilgit, Baltistan and the other
part of Kashmir [the Pakistani-controlled Northern Areas and
Azad Kashmir] with the state as those are also parts of our
state. Sheikh Ahmad Mohammadi, secretary of Kargils Islamia
school, commented: We have never supported LBA in their demand and we will not allow trifurcation. Anything claimed by
LBA should not be attributed to us. Another speaker, Kargils NC
representative in the IJK assembly, who was also a junior minister
in the IJK government, deplored the myth that Ladakh has a solely
or predominantly Buddhist character. The meeting also com-

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plained that Buddhist groups based in Leh were receiving an unfair share of development funds granted to Ladakh, at Kargils expense.22 The partition plan advocated by the Indian far right is
likely to open a Pandoras box of contending claims, identities,
and preferences in IJK, and add yet another incendiary element to
a volatile internal conict.
The range of partitionist possibilities surveyed here reveals how
tenuous, and counter-productive, the partitionist approach is as a
solution to the Kashmir conict. This is consistent with rigorous comparative research that has found the claims of academic
advocates of partition as a conict-resolution strategy to be empirically unsustainable, and with my own critique elsewhere of
partition both as a general prescription for divided societies and
for the post-Yugoslav Balkans in particular.23

Lessons for Peace

The primary insight that emerges from this survey of plebiscitary
and partitionist approaches to the Kashmir conict can be stated
with brevity. None of the three nation-state perspectives on
Kashmirthe authoritarian, integrationist Indian version; the irredentist, revisionist Pakistani version; and the simplistic view of
self-determination often promoted by Kashmir independentists
can hope to impose its will as a solution to the contemporary
Kashmir problem.24 Attempts to impose any one of these perspectives are bound to degenerate into repression, and ultimately
guarantee prolongation of both internal and international conict. The three ideologically based and territorially xated nationstate perspectives, in their maximalist forms, lead to nothing but
an impasse. The only possibility of moving from conict toward
peace is by a different approach, which is sensitive to the constraints of realpolitik and the basic interests and aspirations of all

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the contending parties, but is nonetheless able to transcend the

trap of contending nation-state perspectives. Such an approach
and framework is developed in Chapter 5.
Contested sovereigntydisagreement over the legitimate borders of political communityremains the core of the Kashmir
crisis. In the autumn of 2002 the government of India held elections to constitute a new IJK legislature and government. The
elections were condemned by Pakistan as a farcical diversion and
boycotted by the Hurriyat Conference, the coalition of groups
in IJK favoring self-determination, some of whose leaders were
wooed with the lure of ofce and other inducements to participate by Indian ofcials but eventually declined to take the bait.
In mid-September 2002 the rst phase of these elections was
held, covering constituencies in the northern Valley districts of
Baramulla and Kupwara, the Jammu districts of Rajouri and
Poonch, and the Kargil district in Ladakh. The public response,
and the rates of polling recorded, presented a mixed picture, underlining the extreme complexity of politics in Kashmir. In the
districts of Baramulla and Kupwara, major towns such as
Baramulla, Sopore, and Bandipore, as well as extensive tracts in
rural areas, witnessed negligible polling verging on a total boycott
in some cases. Small demonstrations against Indian-sponsored
elections and for azaadi took place at several locations, including
the towns of Baramulla and Pattan. Elections are irrelevant and
an attempt by the government of India to mislead the international community, said a citizen in Sopore. Even if the [Indian]
security forces cut us into pieces we will not vote. This is no alternative to the right of self-determination.25 This is the opinion and
stance of a large segment of IJKs population, especially in the
Kashmir Valley.
There were also reports of Indian military and paramilitary soldiers intimidating and terrorizing citizens to force them to vote,

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especially in rural areas. In Kulangam, a large Kupwara village off

the Sopore-Handwara road, one 25-year-old man, who was too
afraid to give his name, said he went to vote after being beaten by
soldiers who came to his house. When I refused to go, they hit
me. Then they took us to the main road and told local policemen
to escort us to the polling station. They told us they would come
back later to check whether we had an ink mark on our nger
(polling ofcials put indelible ink on the ngernail of every person
who votes to prevent multiple voting). A shopkeeper in the same
village said three or four soldiers knocked on his door soon after
polling began. They said to me go to the polling station and cast
your vote. Why are you inside? Were worried they will come
back and beat us. I dont want to vote, Im on a poll boycott. The
people want freedom from India, they dont want elections [that
seek to legitimize Indian rule].
At the polling station, a long queue of voters waited . . . Many
said they were voting because the army gave them no choice. I
was on the road going to my house when 1012 soldiers told me I
have to vote. So I have come here. I am in favour of independence. I didnt want to vote, one voter said. Another Kulangam
citizen claimed that the army came to my house at 6.30 am, I
hadnt even taken my tea, while in Dangapora, a village in neighboring Baramulla district, yet another said, The army threatened
us, telling us that if we did not vote they would say we had been
found with a gun and arrest us. In Loland, another village in
Baramulla district, soldiers were seen moving through the streets
speaking to shopkeepers and people on the streets. After they had
passed, people said they were being told to go to the polling stations. Virtually noone from the village had voted so far as they
were boycotting the elections. The soldiers denied they were coercing voters and said they were searching for terrorists.26
When a group of journalists reached Karihama, Dedikote,

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Pazipora and adjacent villages [in Baramulla], people were seen

being herded by security forces to polling booths. They have
asked us to vote and we will have to abide by their directions.
They will conduct a nail-parade in the evening to check if we
have voted, whether our nails are marked with ink or not, said a
Karihama villager. In another village in Kupwara, local youth
sitting on the road said they were trying to procure a bottle of indelible ink to mark their own ngers.27
In Chogal village, near the town of Handwara in the Kupwara
district, a young man who had worked as a polling agent for a candidate said, The boycott here is so absolute that even my own
family did not turn up [to vote]. I am now worried what to do
when I return home. Earlier that day the following sequence
of events unfolded in Chogal: Around 9.30 am a group of Army
personnel appeared, and started knocking on doors asking villagers to vote. They barged in and asked everybody to come out.
We tried to resist but they pushed us with their rie butts. They
took us at least a kilometer, then we saw a crowd gathered in the
chowk [market square]. The crowd started shouting slogans for
azaadi and the army men then left us alone. Another citizen
said, They called me and asked me why I had not gone to vote. I
was so scared I said I dont have a vote and they started hitting me.
I was slapped and hit with rie butts.28
There were many other reports of threats and beatings, including of women in villages near Handwara and Bandipore. In a village near the Baramulla town of Sangrama, a crowd of twentyve hundred enraged locals burned the jeep of the NC candidate
after security forces arrested a village woman because one of her
sons was a guerrilla.29 Indian authorities claimed that 40 percent
of eligible citizens had exercised their franchise in Baramulla district and 55 percent in the much smaller Kupwara district. These

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gures include numerous involuntary voters; in addition, up to a

million and a half eligible citizens in the Kashmir Valley have simply not registered to vote and are thus not counted when calculating these percentages. Participation by women was also extremely
low in most areas.30
Not all of the voting was fraudulent or coerced, however. In at
least half of fourteen constituencies in the two districts (ten in
Baramulla, four in Kupwara), there was substantial genuine polling. In some remote constituencies dominated by ethnic Gujjar
electorates (Uri and Gurez in Baramulla, Karnah in Kupwara),
anti-India sentiment is less strong than in Kashmiri-speaking areas
and opposition to Indian-sponsored processes and institutions is
less pronounced. In other constituencies some people voted out
of loyalty to a particular local candidate, or to ensure the defeat
of a detested candidate. Both motivations were at work in the
Baramulla constituency of Sonawari, in the hinterland of the
town of Pattan. Parts of this constituency are the base of the Valleys best-known guerrilla-turned-pro-India-gunman, Kuka Parray,
a hero to some and a criminal to many others.
The major factor motivating people to vote, however, was the
presence of a number of credible candidates opposing the ruling
NC party in the two districts. In Kupwara, these candidates, standing as independents, mostly belonged to the locally inuential
Peoples Conference (PC) party, a moderate party favoring selfdetermination whose veteran leader, Abdul Ghani Lone, had been
assassinated in Srinagar by suspected pro-Pakistan extremists in
May 2002. In Kupwaras Handwara constituency, a PC bastion,
the decision of Ghulam Mohiuddin So, a Lone lieutenant, to run
as an independent candidate (the PC being a constituent of the
Hurriyat Conference coalition boycotting the polls) against the sitting legislator, a minister in the NC government, evoked a great

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deal of local enthusiasm.31 So eventually won the Handwara seat

by a narrow margin over his NC rival, but other PC men standing
as independents in the Kupwara district surprisingly lost to the unpopular NC, highlighting the difculties of a ballot-oriented strategy for advocates of self-determination in the absence of a real
Kashmir peace process at the internal and international levels.
In several constituencies of the sprawling Baramulla district,
people inclined to vote saw an attractive option in the Peoples
Democratic Party (PDP), a basically pro-India party in the Valley
which nonetheless adopted a pro-people posture against abuses
of human rights and brutalities committed by Indian security
forces. The PDP was formed in 1999 under the leadership of the
political veteran Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, formerly the Valleys
top Congress leader, who quit Congress and formed his own IJKbased party. Its best-known face is Sayeeds elder daughter
Mehbooba Mufti, a ery and popular campaigner for citizens human and civil rights. The PDP campaigned on a platform of defense and restoration of those rights and on a vision of a comprehensive Kashmir peace process involving India, Pakistan, and all
sections of political opinion in IJK. This progressive program appealed to a section of the Valleys electorate, where the PDP won
sixteen of forty-six electoral districts and subsequently formed a
government, headed by Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, in coalition
with the Congress (which did very well in Hindu-dominated parts
of the Jammu region) and with the support of several smaller parties and independents.32
I argued in Chapter 2 that the prime reason for the radicalization of political dissent in IJK, culminating in insurrection in 1989
1990, was the purposeful stiing of opposition within institutional
politics by the Indian state, operating in collusion with local client
elites, since the 1950s. In the autumn 2002 elections, it appeared

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that some citizens even in areas supporting self-determination

were trying to make the most of limited opportunities to nd an
institutional outlet for opposition voices to the deeply unpopular
NC government, installed in ofce since 1996. The NC, led by
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullahs elder son Farooq and grandson
Omar, was widely viewed not just as hopelessly corrupt and incompetent and an unapologetic sponsor of brutal counterinsurgency policies, but also as a major obstacle to a wider peace process involving the Hurriyat Conference groups and Pakistan.
Thus in the Kupwara village of Trehgam, the birthplace of the
JKLF pioneer Maqbool Butt, 83 percent of the electorate voted
without duress. Butts aged mother denounced the voting as betrayal of the blood of martyrs; the villagers listened respectfully
but voted anyway. An elderly woman explained: Our vote isnt
against freedom. It is against the National Conference. Indeed, a
group of villagers started shouting pro-independence slogans after casting their votes at 8.30 am. India shouldnt think our vote is
to legitimize its rule in Kashmir, several village men cautioned. It
is for dislodging the NC. In Lone-Harie, Abdul Ghani Lones ancestral village, a young man asserted: We will continue to work
for the cause of Lone. This vote is not against the Hurriyat and
the freedom struggle, just against the NC.33
In the Baramulla constituency of Gulmarg, which includes the
famous holiday resort of the same name, early-morning voters
talked of defeating people who create obstacles to peace.
Standing in the long queue of voters at 8.15 am outside the polling booth, a man in his sixties said, Today I am voting for a new
party that has promised to work with all people to bring peace.
The PDP, then in opposition, was an especially strong contender
in this area, and its candidate, the senior party leader Ghulam
Hassan Mir, subsequently won the seat by a huge margin over his

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NC rival, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullahs younger son Mustafa

Kamal. In a nearby village in the same constituency,
mist blanketed the village and Farooq Ahmad Bhat shivered in the early-morning chill, walking to the nearest
polling center to cast his vote. Bhat, 22, was the rst
voter in Gulmargs Batapora village . . . Bhat reached
the polling center at 7.20 am. [After voting he spoke of
his hopes]: The candidate I have voted for would strive
for peace between India and Pakistan. He would ght
for removal of [Indian] Army installations from residential areas, and the removal also of the SOG [counterterrorism Special Operations Group] of the J&K police, which is even worse than the Rashtriya Ries [the
armys counterinsurgency wing] . . . This violence cannot go on endlessly.34

The overwhelming majority of the people of Jammu and Kashmir desperately want peace. The sovereignty issue remains, as in
19471948 and 19891990, the heart of the matter. A peace process
based on a framework capable of addressing the multiple but interrelated local and international dimensions that make up this
conict is a critical, urgent necessity.

PATHWAYS TO PEACE

Whenever things threatened to fall apart during our negotiationsand they did on many occasionswe would stand
back and remind ourselves that if negotiations broke down
the outcome would be a bloodbath of unimaginable proportions, and that after the bloodbath we would have to sit
down again and negotiate with each other. The thought always sobered us up and we persisted, despite many setbacks. You negotiate with your enemies, not your friends.
n e l s o n m a n d e l a,
reecting on the transition to a
multiracial democracy in South Africa, 1997

In his address to the United Nations General Assembly in the autumn of 2002, Secretary-General Ko Annan
identied hostility between India and Pakistan as one of the most
perilous threats to global peace and security. In South Asia,
he noted, the world has recently come closer than for many

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years past to a direct conict between two nuclear weaponcapable states. The underlying causes of the conict must be addressed, he argued, gladly acknowledging and strongly
welcoming efforts made by well-placed U.N. member-states to
persuade the two countries to reduce the tension (in June 2002 apprehension about an imminent India-Pakistan war had eased after
a visit by Richard Armitage, a U.S. deputy secretary of state, to the
capitals of both countries). If another confrontation between the
two countries threatened to ignite war, Annan warned, the international community might have a role to play. The next day it
was reported, citing a top U.S. ofcial as the source, that during
discussions in New York, Annan and U.S. President George W.
Bush had agreed on their hope to move beyond crisis management to real solutions on Kashmir.1
Around the time the dangers of festering conict in and over
Kashmir were being discussed in the corridors of global politics
and diplomacy, a controversy arose in India over an advertisement
by Cadbury India Limited, the Indian branch of a leading international confectionery manufacturer. Seeking to sell a new brand of
chocolates called Temptations, the advertisement depicted a map
of Jammu and Kashmir along with a caption: Im good. Im
tempting. Im too good to share. What am I? Cadburys Temptations or Kashmir? A minor furor ensued. The head of the Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the city of Mumbai
(Bombay), Indias commercial and nancial center, pointed out
that Kashmir is a very sensitive issue and thousands of [Indian]
soldiers have sacriced their lives for it . . . such ads just trivialize
the issue. How can an ad campaign, in the name of creativity,
even imply that Kashmir is a state to be shared with anyone? he
asked, threatening national protests to force the withdrawal of
the advertisement. The rm relented immediately. The press ad-

Copyright 2003 The President and Fellows of Harvard College

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vertisement for Cadburys Temptations, a statement claried,

was issued entirely in good faith, with no intention whatsoever
to offend the sentiments of the public. We offer our sincere apology to any section of the public that may have been offended.2
Meanwhile, a different drama was dominating public attention
in Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir (IJK). This related to
the case of a woman named Shehnaz Kausar, a Pakistani citizen
from a village in Mirpur, a district in Pakistani-controlled Azad
Jammu and Kashmir (AJK). In October 1995 Shehnaz, then a recent bride aged twenty-ve, jumped into the Jhelum River to commit suicide after being physically and mentally tortured by her inlaws. As fate would have it, she did not drown but was washed
up by the rivers currents on the Indian side of the Line of Control
(LOC), and was arrested by the Indian army. After interrogating
her for three days, Indian military intelligence concluded that she
was not a spy, and handed her over to local police authorities.
She was then charged under clause 2, section 3 of IJKs Ingress and
Internal Movement (Control) Ordinance, and subsequently sentenced to fteen months imprisonment and a ne of 500 Indian
rupees for illegal breach of the LOC.
Shehnaz was sent to a district jail in the IJK town of Poonch,
close to the de facto border with AJK, to serve her sentence.
There she was repeatedly raped by Mohammed Din, a prison
guard. After enduring several weeks of violence she complained
to senior jail staff, who transferred her in late January 1996 to the
regions central jail in the city of Jammu, 250 kilometers south of
Poonch. There it was discovered that she had become pregnant. In
October 1996 Shehnaz gave birth in prison to a daughter, whom
she named Mobeen. In February 1997 her jail term ended but the
woman was not released. Instead she was kept in prison, along
with her baby, pending repatriation to Pakistan. A no-objection

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certicate needed for her repatriation took Indian authorities

four years to process, and was issued only in June 2001. In the interim, Shehnaz started to earn a basic living stitching clothes in
prison, and Mobeen started going to nursery school with a daily
police escort.
In June 2001 the mother and daughter were taken to a border post at Attari/Wagah, on the India-Pakistan frontier in the
Punjab. Pakistani border guards, known as Rangers, agreed to
take Shehnaz back but refused to accept Mobeen, on the grounds
that the little girl was not a Pakistani citizen but an Indian.
Shehnaz refused to return to Pakistan without her daughter, and
was driven back to prison in Jammu. There, to provide a legal basis for her continued detention, she was arrested under the Jammu
and Kashmir Public Safety Act (PSA), a draconian IJK law which is
normally used against suspected terrorists and others accused of
subversive and anti-national activity and provides for two years
of incommunicado detention without any formal charge, court
appearance, or trial.
Shehnaz Kausars case was taken up before the IJK high court
by a Jammu lawyer, A. K. Sawhney (incidentally a Hindu) and his
son Aseem Sawhney. In August 2002 a two-judge Jammu bench of
the court, consisting of Justice Tejinder Singh Doabia and Justice
Sudesh Kumar Gupta (a Sikh and a Hindu, respectively) issued a
nineteen-page ruling. The ruling quashed Shehnazs detention under the PSA as unconvincing, observed that the woman had already served her sentence for violating the LOC, and noted that a
small child was being forced to grow up in prison for no fault of
her own. Under normal circumstances, the judges wrote, a minor is to have the same domicile as his or her father. But this being a case where the paternity of the child had not yet been
denitively ascertained, the court directed that as a child con-

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ceived and born in the state [of IJK] Mobeen would be treated as
domiciled in IJK. (Mohammed Din, suspended from his job, was
being tried at the time for rape in a district court, and DNA samples had been taken from him and Mobeen to establish paternity.
Din was apparently inclined to acknowledge paternity, but only if
Shehnaz rst withdrew the rape charge.) As such, the judgment
stipulated, Mobeen was entitled to claim and receive citizenship
of the Republic of India, and was free to stay on in IJK indenitely,
or until she was accepted by Pakistani authorities and wished of
her own accord to go to Pakistan.
The court also ruled that as the minor cannot stay without
her mother, who is her legal guardian, the consequential order of
releasing her [Shehnaz] is also being passed. The court further
ordered the IJK government, which it noted was the accused rapists employer, to pay Shehnaz compensation of 300,000 Indian rupees for wrongful imprisonment, which would be deposited in
Mobeens name and used to fund her education, and to arrange
housing facilities for the mother and daughter. The IJK government did not follow up on these orders with any urgency, and a
few weeks after their release, Shehnaz and Mobeen, the latter approaching her sixth birthday, were living temporarily in their lawyers home. Sawhney then led a contempt petition against the
IJK government, and the high court issued notices to the state
[IJK] chief secretary and director-general of police for alleged deliberate and intentional delay in implementing the court orders.
But the worst of Shehnazs seven-year ordeal was clearly over.
The case and the verdict aroused great interest throughout IJK,
especially since under the provisions of IJKs Resettlement Act
(whose operation is temporarily suspended under an order from
Indias Supreme Court in response to a plea from the government of India, which fears its potentially destabilizing implica-

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tions), Shehnaz, as a resident of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir,

over which India claims rightful sovereignty, is automatically entitled to resettle in IJK. A Child without a Father Gets a Country in
Jammu & Kashmir was the headline of one front-page story,
datelined Jammu, in a major Indian newspaper based in Delhi,
while another report, datelined Srinagar, carried in Indian Jammu
and Kashmirs top English daily, was headlined: Shehnaz Symbolizes Tragedy of the Two Kashmirs.3

Conceptualizing Peace
Kashmir is one of the worlds great frontier regions. This is not
just in the geographical sense, although the territory is wedged
between Pakistan, India, China (Xinjiang province and Tibet),
and, in one northwestern corner, Afghanistan. It is also, and more
signicantly, a frontier in the political and ideological sense
where Indian and Pakistani state nationalisms (and their respective followings within Kashmir) collide with each other and clash
with a third quasi-nationalism, a homeland identity centered on
but not limited to the Valley of Kashmir, which spawns a popular
conception of sovereignty at odds with the claims of both states.
This intractable and intricate conict presents an extraordinarily
daunting challenge for any peace-building process. The analysis
and argument I have developed in this book suggest that any such
process needs to be based on the following principles:
The contending nation-state perspectives on Kashmir
are stalemated. The intrinsic character of the dispute calls
for a multinational framework of peace-buildinga framework that acknowledges and accommodates all of the
competing national (and quasi-national) identities and
agendas, and negates and rejects none. This need notin-

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deed for practical reasons perhaps should notbe the explicitly stated basis of any peace process. A tacit, implicit
understanding and commitment will more than sufce.
The Kashmir conict has multiple dimensions and is dened by a complex intersection of an international dispute with sources of conict internal to the disputed territory and its Indian- and Pakistani-controlled parts. Any
approach to resolving this multi-layered conict must
necessarily involve multiple, but connected and mutually
reinforcing, tracks or axes of engagement and dialogue.
The de facto Indian and Pakistani sovereignties over their
respective areas of Kashmir cannot, should not, and need
not be changed. As I have shown, especially in Chapter 4,
ideas of either erasing or redrawing the border currently
known as the LOC are both infeasible and potentially extremely dangerous, risking sharp escalation of the conict. Fortunately, eliminating or shifting existing de facto
borders and jurisdictions is not at all necessary for a viable peace process. The substance of the Kashmir problem can be adequately addressed without altering the territorial status quo, and ways exist of transcending the
limitations imposed by those frontiers without abolishing them.
The maintenance of existing de facto sovereign jurisdictions and the territorial status quo between states must
be complemented, and balanced, by recognition and redress of the grievances and aspirations of the large proportion of the population of J&Kparticularly of IJK
who see themselves as victims of the stance and policies

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of one or both states. The term azaadi (freedom), the

driving force of movements for self-determination in
Kashmir for over six decades, has multiple meanings and
a uidity that can potentially become an asset, if rigid
meanings premised on territory give way to an interpretation that foregrounds democratic rights to participation, representation, and self-government. Unless and until state power comes to an honorable accommodation
and compromise with such a subtly reframed, nonmaximalist yet substantial meaning of azaadi, Kashmir
will remain a zone of intractable, recurrent conict.
An approach premised on these basic principles does not necessitate that any of the contending states and non-state political actors in Kashmir formally renounce or repudiate their established
positions and declaratory ideological stances. It requires only a
willingness to engage with other points of view in a civilized manner and the negotiating skills to craft a strategic compromise between opposed perspectives.

Of contemporary conicts involving disputes over the legitimate

locus and unit of sovereignty and clashing visions of national selfdetermination on the same territory, Northern Irelands conict
bears a striking resemblance to that of Kashmir. As in Kashmir,
the origins of the problem are to be found in the circumstances
of imperial Britains withdrawal from its colony, Ireland, in the
early 1920s, when twenty-six of Irelands thirty-two counties were
constituted as an Irish Free State (which became a republic in
1937) while six northern counties were retained under British sovereignty. The population of this six-county unit, comprising the

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major part of the historic region of Ulster, was more than twothirds Protestant, a community that considered its national identity to be British, not Irish, and whose leaders were implacably opposed to becoming citizens of any kind of Irish state. However, almost one-third of the population consisted of Catholics, who
regarded their national identity as Irish and became a minority
stranded on the wrong side of the border created by Irelands
partition. Their plight was compounded when Northern Irelands
Protestant elite, with Londons tolerance if not active encouragement, erected a regime systematically repressive and discriminatory toward the Catholic population, who were seen as a disloyal
minority and a Trojan horse for the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish
Republic south of the border, which regarded Northern Ireland as
a temporarily separated part of the national territory. Northern
Irelands Catholics endured the status of third-class citizens for almost fty years, until a major civil rights movement developed
in the late 1960s. The Protestant regime responded with severe
police repression, and the long-simmering conict of aspirations
and allegiances in Northern Ireland rapidly boiled over into a major crisis.
In the early 1970s Northern Ireland descended into a situation
approximating civil war, as a resurgent Irish Republican Army
(IRA) emerged from decades of hibernation to confront the forces
of the Protestant regime, and loyalist (extreme pro-British)
armed groups appeared in the Protestant community to counter
the IRA. Large numbers of British troops were sent to Northern
Ireland to restore order and keep the warring groups apart. Although some sections of the Catholic community initially welcomed the soldiers as protection from Protestant police and
mobs, relations deteriorated precipitously, and in a matter of
months British soldiers became targets of the IRA, whose republi-

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can ideology saw British control of Northern Ireland as the source

of the entire problem.
In 1972 the authorities in London dissolved the Protestant regime and Northern Ireland entered a lengthy period of direct
rule from the British capital. On the ground, a protracted, ugly
war of attrition ensued involving the IRA, armed loyalist groups,
the overwhelmingly Protestant Northern Ireland police force, and
the British army. During three decades of the Troubles, some
thirty-ve hundred persons were killed in political violence and
thirty-six thousand injured (of a population of 1.5 million). Tens
of thousands were driven out of their homes, and thousands
served prison time for perpetrating violence, including grisly sectarian murders, and for being members of illegal paramilitary organizations. Northern Ireland acquired a well-deserved reputation
as the site of an extremely bitter, intractable conict and as one of
the most divided, polarized societies on earth. In the early 1980s a
historian of Ireland wrote the following words: History is indeed
a difcult prison to escape from and the history of Ireland [is] as
difcult as any . . . Yet change is the business of history and the
historian has a vested interest in seeing change come about. Having traced the foundations on which the prison of Irish history
was built he can only wait and hope to see British and Irish alike
one day walk away.4
Because of the structural similarities between the conicts in
Northern Ireland and Kashmiran inter-state sovereignty dispute
(a legacy of imperial withdrawal and partition) over a territory,
paralleled by polarization of the territorys population between
groups with different national identities and incompatible notions
of self-determinationthe path to troubled peace in Northern
Ireland is of interest and relevance. Like that in Northern Ireland,
the Kashmir conict has multiple dimensions and is dened by

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the intersection of internal conict caused by clashing preferences on identity and allegiance with a long-standing international contest over legitimate sovereignty. The Northern Ireland
peace process, which resulted in the landmark Good Friday
Agreement of April 1998, marked a moment when the countries
and factions involved made, in the words of the Republic of Irelands prime minister, enormous moves that they had dared not
dream about for the previous seventy years, that is, since the inception of the Northern Ireland question.5 The Agreement has
three strands, each corresponding to one dimension of the
problem:
Strand 1 relates to the internal political setup and governmental structure of Northern Ireland. The institutional design is
premised on the notion that the Unionist (British) and Nationalist (Irish) identities in Northern Ireland, and the rival political
aspirations and preferences that ow from them, are equally legitimate and must both be accommodated in the institutional
framework on the basis of equality, mutual recognition, and tolerance (however reluctantly given by some). The legislature is the
108-member Northern Ireland Assembly, in which the Unionist
and Nationalist segments of the population are represented, along
with a small minority of others who reject being pigeonholed in
either category, in proportion to their strengths in the population.
Catholics have gained from demographic change and are now at
least 43 percent of Northern Irelands population, so the rst postAgreement Assembly has 58 declared Unionists, split between proAgreement moderates and rejectionist hardliners, 42 declared Nationalists, divided between a slight majority of 24 moderate Nationalists and 18 pro-IRA republicans, and 8 members unafliated
with either bloc. This Assembly can make decisions and pass legislation on major political issues only by cross-community consent,

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that is, by concurrent majorities in the Unionist and Nationalist

blocs (on other matters, the same cross-community voting procedure can be triggered at the request of 30 deputies).
The executive arm of government, the cabinet, consists of an
equal number of ministers from the Unionist and Nationalist
communities, and the major parties of both communities are represented in this cabinet. This broadly based, power-sharing executive is jointly headed by a rst minister and a deputy rst minister elected by means of the cross-community consent procedure.
This is intended to ensure that the rst minister is a moderate
Unionist and his deputy a moderate Nationalist, who should be
able to work together. The Northern Ireland institutions enjoy jurisdiction over a wide range of powers devolved from the center
(the British Parliament in Westminster), with the possibility of
further expansion of autonomy with the consent of the [British]
secretary of state [for Northern Ireland affairs] and the approval
of Westminster; maximum autonomy while remaining within
the Union is feasible, provided there is agreement to that within
the Northern Ireland Assembly.6 The overall structure of government is a model of consociation: power-sharing between representatives of the fundamental political segments in a divided society.
This structure and its procedures lend themselves to deadlock and
blackmail, but they also provide a vital guarantee of inclusiveness,
sharing of political power, and a barrier against the hegemony
let alone a monopoly of political authority and ofceof any one
segment or school of opinion.
Strand 2 of the Agreement deals with the cross-border dimension of the Northern Ireland question. Under the terms of the
Agreement, the Republic of Ireland has signicantly modied its
claim to Northern Ireland and accepts that British sovereignty
over Northern Ireland can yield to Irish sovereigntythat is, uni-

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cation of the island of Irelandonly if and when a majority of

Northern Irelands people vote in favor of such a change. As I
pointed out in Chapter 4, this effectively postpones the issue, since
Unionists will continue to be a thin majority of Northern Irelands
population for at least another decadebut in the event of a future Catholic majority, this plebiscitary provision may have deeply
inammatory implications. However, two facts remain: Northern
Ireland is a part of the Irish Isle; and it contains a very large
(and growing) minority that considers its national identity to be
Irish, not British, and probably supports a united Ireland (although moderate Nationalists, unlike republicans, are typically
willing to soft-pedal this issue in deference to Protestant opinion).
Strand 2 of the 1998 Agreement thus establishes an institution of
cross-border linkage and cooperationthe North-South Ministerial Council (NSMC).
As its name suggests, this body consists of ministers from
Northern Irelands autonomous, power-sharing government and
their counterparts from the Republic of Irelands sovereign government. Its broad mandate is to develop cooperation between
the two governments in areas where there is judged to be signicant mutual cross-border and all-island benet in doing so.
During negotiations leading to the Agreement, Unionists tried to
minimize the scope and authority of this cross-border council,
while Nationalists emphasized its importance. In the end, a rapprochement was reached whereby the NSMC was empowered
to implement policy for the entire island in a few relatively uncontroversial spheresinland waterways, food safety, trade and business development, European Union programs, the Irish/Gaelic
and Ulster/Scottish languages, and aquaculture and marine matters. It was charged with the task of gradually developing crossborder links and cooperation on a broader and more signicant

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range of subjects, including aspects of transport, agriculture, education, health, environmental protection, and promotion of tourism. It was made compulsory for all Northern Ireland ministers
Unionists as well as Nationaliststo participate in the NSMC, and
the NSMC and the Northern Ireland Assembly were made codependent, meaning that one cannot survive and function without
the other. The NSMC is supposed to meet twice a year in plenary
format, and ministers can also meet individually on a regular and
frequent basis with their counterparts to discuss links and cooperation in their elds of responsibility. The overall effect of Strand
2 is to introduce a limited, north-south confederal element into relations between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Strand 3 of the Agreement provides the foundation for the ambitious institutional architecture established by Strands 1 and 2. It
aims to promote the harmonious and mutually benecial development of the totality of relationships between all the governments and peoples of the British and Irish Isles. One institution
that works to this end is the British-Irish Council, a deliberative forum jointly chaired by the prime ministers of Britain and the Republic of Ireland, which brings together not only ministers in the
two sovereign governments and members of the British and Irish
parliaments but also executive members (ministers) from all of
the United Kingdoms devolved, autonomous regional governmentsScotland and Wales in addition to Northern Ireland. A
much more signicant institution for practical purposes is the
British-Irish Inter-Governmental Conference, which is chaired by
the Republic of Irelands foreign minister and the British governments secretary of state for Northern Ireland affairs, and is supported by a standing secretariat. This intergovernmental institution gives the Republic of Ireland consultative access to all British
policy formulation on Northern Ireland matters that have not

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been devolved to the competency of the autonomous Northern

Ireland institutions (and perhaps also the cross-border NSMC),
and that thus remain under the jurisdiction of the British government (that is, on the equivalent of a Union List of subjects). There
is provision for members of the Northern Ireland Assembly to be
involved in these intergovernmental consultations, but not on the
same footing as the representatives of the governments of the two
sovereign states.
In May 1998 this multidimensional agreement was put to parallel referenda, conducted separately, in Northern Ireland and the
Republic of Ireland. It was approved by an overwhelming majority of 96 percent in the Republic. In Northern Ireland, 71 percent of those voting supported the framework, including the vast
majority of Catholic voters but only a very slender majority of
Protestant voters.

The point of this survey of Northern Irelands peace-building

framework is not to suggest that it is a model than can be readily
replicated or transplanted to any other location of conict, including Kashmir. Every case has its own specic context, features, and
dynamics. But specicity does not equal uniqueness. No two situations of conict are ever identical, but they are often comparable:
although there are important differences, there may also be signicant, even striking similarities. Among major contemporary
conicts, that in Northern Ireland, with its conguration of internal and international sources and local and external dimensions,
provides the most meaningful comparison to Kashmir. The approach and framework for moving from intractable, perennial
conict to peaceable accommodation in Northern Ireland may
hold interesting and relevant clues, perhaps even lessons, for

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peacemaking in Kashmir. The substance, content, and sequencing

of a peace process will certainly vary, because of differences in
contexts and specic attributes, but the basic principles and essential elements dening such a process may not be signicantly dissimilar.
Protracted violence marked by brutality engenders radicalization and deepens divides, but over time it also releases an opposite dynamic in a war-torn society: war-weariness, a desperate
yearning for the return of a peaceful, normal climate, and delegitimation of violent methods among all but a hard core of sectarian extremists on all sides. A quarter-century of the Troubles
produced such a situation in Northern Ireland, where most ordinary people, regardless of sharp differences in allegiances and
sympathies, wished the gun to be taken out of politics. This public
sentiment had a gradual, subtle, but ultimately powerful effect on
the thinking of political forces on both sides of the divide, and it
remains a vital asset of the Northern Ireland peace process, which
is undergoing a difcult implementation. Apart from fringe extremists, nobody wants the peace process there to collapse entirely, because the prospect of a return to violent polarization is
unacceptable to most. As the fate of the Palestinian-Israeli process
in the Middle East demonstrates, the aftermath of a failed peace
process is likely to be even worse, and more destabilizing, than no
peace process at all.
After more than thirteen years of unrelenting violence, the
gun culture evokes revulsion among the vast majority of people
in Jammu and Kashmir, particularly in the theater of armed conict in IJKregardless of differences in political persuasions and
allegiances. Protracted armed conict has not only inicted terrible human loss and suffering but also had a deeply adverse impact
on infrastructures and the environment, which are basic to the

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quality of life. This ultimately affects almost all people in the population, whether they identify with the pro-India, pro-Pakistan, or
pro-independence segments. War-weariness also affects the Indian
military, paramilitary, and police forces deployed in Kashmir, most
of whom would welcome a respite, leading optimistically to permanent liberation, from the thankless, life-endangering task of
ensuring security and combating guerrillas (although it needs to
be mentioned that some elements of the counterinsurgency
apparatus have a vested interest in conict because they reap signicant material benets from itfat nancial rewards for killing
insurgents, ransom extorted from families of citizens detained, often fraudulently, as militant supporters, and prots secured from
smuggling Kashmirs natural resources such as timber).
This war-weariness presents a genuine if in itself slight opportunity to work toward peace. However, as in Northern Ireland,
that opportunity can bear fruit only if a serious accommodation
and compromise can be fashioned between polarized views and
contending positions. That in turn can occur only if and when
the principal protagonists-cum-adversaries realize that the conict
is a harmful and burdensome stalemate, which none can hope to
win unequivocally and permanently. It is only then that the
logic of mutual destruction can yield to the logic of mutual accommodation, a turning point reached in another protracted and
vicious South Asian conict, the ethnic war in Sri Lanka, after
twenty years of bloodletting, belligerence, and confrontation.
The limits to comparing Northern Ireland with Kashmir are obvious. Three salient points of difference, in particular, suggest that
the road to peace in Kashmir and the subcontinent may be considerably more tortuous than that in Northern Ireland.
First, the peace process in Northern Ireland was, and remains,
driven by the shared determination of the British and Irish states

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to nd a viable and durable formula for peace. This joint endeavor

and resolveevident since the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement between the two governments, in retrospect an important precursor to the much more comprehensive Good Friday Agreement
reached thirteen years laterhas sought to set aside a centuriesold history of bitter animosity between British and Irish. It has
been facilitated by the fact that the majority of people in mainland Britain do not regard Northern Ireland as an absolutely integral part of the British state and that leaders of the Republic of
Ireland, while sympathetic to the grievances and aspirations of
the Nationalist population in Northern Ireland, have generally rejected the ideology and methods of violent Irish republicanism as
both immoral and self-defeating to the cause of Irish nationalism.
Even so, the shared agenda of making peace has been severely
tested before and after the landmark 1998 agreement by internal
(intersegmental) antagonisms in Northern Ireland as well as by
the continuing appeal of a hard-line rejectionist position among a
large section of the Unionist population (which suggests that in
addition to intersegmental antagonism, intrasegmental disagreements, as for example among the Sinhalese-Buddhist majority of
Sri Lanka, may be obstacles to peace agreements and their lasting
stabilization).
In Jammu and Kashmir (especially in IJK), the internal divisions
between segments with conicting notions of self-determination
are real, but the major obstacle to a peace process is the abysmal
relations between India and Pakistan. The governments of the
two countries are usually inclined almost reexively to a stance of
zero-sum confrontation on the Kashmir dispute, and make a habit
of promoting and articulating maximalist stances and uncompromising rhetoric on the question. Both have formidable pressure
groups resistant to the subtle, tacit change of direction necessary

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for a peace process. In Pakistan, inuential elements of the military elite may not be disposed to make peace with India, and may
favor the policy established since the late 1980sthreatened after
11 September 2001 by the changed geopolitical context and American pressureof bleeding India by supporting insurgency. In Indias diverse political spectrum, exibility on Kashmir, based on a
genuine, realistic acknowledgment of deeply rooted grievances
in IJK and of the necessity of working with Pakistan if the problem is to be meaningfully tackled, is the exception rather than
the norm. There are indications in particular that right-wing
Hindu sectarian elements, which have become a major inuence
on policymaking at the heart of the BJP-led coalition governing
in New Delhi, favor exploiting a continuing conict in and over
Kashmir for their own domestic political purposes.
A second difference between J&K and Northern Ireland is that
British-Irish intergovernmental cooperation on Northern Ireland
was greatly facilitated by the two countries common membership in a dynamic regional organization of integration and cooperationthe European Community (EC), known since 1992 as the
European Union (EU)which both nations joined in 1972. It is
substantially easier for countries embroiled in a contentious bilateral dispute to cooperate on settling the problem under an overarching regional framework of cooperation and integration,
which links the countries through supra-state institutions and reduces the salience of rigid national-sovereignty discourses and
state borders. Such regional blocs help open up the discursive/
ideological and institutional space for the fashioning of compromise solutions on even the most intractable disputes over territory
and identity. The process of cooperation under the auspices of the
EC/EU, the steadily increasing integration of the European political space, and the growing legitimacy and autonomous role of

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sub-state regions across Europe (as well as emerging trans-frontier

links between such regions) under that framework have been especially helpful to the progressive improvement of British-Irish relations, and to the fashioning of an imaginative, multidimensional
peace process in Northern Ireland.7 No comparable regional body
exists in South Asia, where the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) remains in a largely embryonic
stage, its potential stunted above all by the hostile relations between India and Pakistan.
The third difference is that the Northern Ireland peace process
beneted at crucial junctures from the constructive involvement
of a third party. This was the United States. The Clinton administration developed a keen interest in the nascent moves toward
peace and a negotiated compromise on Northern Ireland as early
as 1994. The respected political veteran the U.S. president sent
to frequently frustrating peace talks between 1995 and 1998, the
former Senate majority leader George J. Mitchell, made useful
contributions to the peace process.8 Indeed, Mitchell was not just
instrumental in the making of the Good Friday accords, but returned to Northern Ireland in late 1999 to help salvage the peace
agreement from the threat of breakdown.
With regard to Kashmir, any third-party role is atly rejected
by India, the status quo power in the conict, which insists on the
bilateral character of the dispute but whose elite appears reluctant to engage in a substantive intergovernmental process with
Pakistan. There is no doubt that any Kashmir peace process must
be driven primarily by the initiative and commitment of the principals, New Delhi and Islamabad. But given the hostility between
the two capitals, the unpromising track record of purely bilateral
dialogue on Kashmir, and the threat the Kashmir conict poses
to regional security and global peace, low-key, indirect, and dis-

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creet facilitation by credible third partieswhich is not styled as

intrusive mediationmay be both necessary and potentially
efcacious.
Even in Sri Lanka, a third-party role played unobtrusively but
effectively by Norway has proved invaluable to the peace process. With regard to Kashmir, any such role would probably be
most effectively played by an informally constituted consortium
of inuential countries, possibly in collaboration with important
multilateral organizations, which does not preclude a country or
countries with particular inuence with one or both principals
playing a more substantial behind-the-scenes role.
This identication of differences between contexts and prospects in Northern Ireland and Kashmir is not only a sobering reminder of the challenges to moving from conict to peace in the
latter case but also an instructive illumination of key points at
which a subcontinental peace process would require reinforcement in order to be minimally viable. In addition, three lessons of
the experience of building peace in Northern Ireland may be relevant to Kashmir.
First, the process should be structured to be in principle as
broadly based and inclusive as possible. The idea is to give the
maximum number of players a stake in the process, while minimizing the number of potential spoilers and wreckers. Of course,
in practice not all players would be of equal or even signicant
weight and inuence, and one should also beware of players who
may be intent on sabotaging a process from within, but the principle of broadly based participation is nonetheless vital. The inclusive principle applies not only but particularly to political representatives of erstwhile or even current militants and terrorists
who are prepared to give dialogue, negotiations, and peace a
chance. In Northern Ireland, the participation in the peace process

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of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Provisional IRA, was anathema to many Unionists, but it was absolutely essential. The participation of small political parties closely linked to loyalist militants
in the Protestant community was also crucial.
Second, any process that seeks to deescalate protracted conicts
and then craft broadly acceptable compromises on issues of fundamental disagreement is necessarily a gradual, time-consuming
endeavor, incremental in nature. It is impractical and can be dangerous to expect decisive results and solutions to emerge virtually overnight. This is not to say that peace processes should be
indenitely prolonged and open-ended. It is important to set reasonable, mutually agreed upon time frames for step-by-step progress, but deadlines should not be an overriding priority.
Third, recurrent crises and even breakdowns are an integral
part of such processes. There are numerous pitfalls, ambushes,
and setbacks on the path to peace in Kashmir, and this is entirely
normal. Indeed, the rocky experience of implementing the April
1998 agreement for Northern Ireland demonstrates that nothing
can be taken for granted even after apparently milestone agreements have been reached. Compromise agreements that attempt
to reconcile conicting claims to sovereignty and self-determination are difcult not only to reach but also to sustain. As experts
on Northern Ireland have written, it cannot be predicted that
multinational political settlements always succeed; in an ethnonationally divided territory over which there are rival claims to
sovereignty, polarized party and paramilitary blocs, and no reasonable prospects of peaceful integration within one nationalist identity . . . such agreements are precarious, but they are innitely
better than the alternativesghting to the nish, or the panaceas
proposed by partisan or nave integrationists.9 However, fundamentally unsound and unequal peace processes such as that be-

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tween the Palestinians and the Israelis can collapse completely

and defy salvage or repair, and this is a contingency that needs to
be guarded against from the outset.10

Track 1: The New DelhiIslamabad Axis

The key to breaking the deadlock in Kashmir lies in the metropolitan capitals of India and Pakistan. Concerted, sustained intergovernmental cooperation between India and Pakistan is the essential basis of any Kashmir peace process. If such intergovernmental
cooperation were to occur, the other dimensions of the Kashmir
problem might turn out to be surprisingly tractable. In its absence, however, no lasting, substantial progress is possible on
those other fronts, and the Kashmir question will continue to be a
prime source of international tension, regional instability, and violent internal conict.
In order to promote a sustained and fruitful peace process, the
intergovernmental framework needs to take an institutionalized
form. It cannot remain ad hoc, limited to periodic, high-prole
eventssuch as meetings between leaders of the two countries or
between career ofcers of the two foreign services. Such encounters, and discussions, must be part of a sustained process and a coherent, institutionalized intergovernmental framework of peacebuilding. An institution such as a permanent intergovernmental
council needs to be constituted.
The ofcial Pakistani position has generally been to insist that
Kashmir is the core issue in India-Pakistan relations, to which
the Indians have usually responded that Pakistan suffers from a
Kashmir xation and that Kashmir is only one of a number of issues between the two countries. The Indians have instead called
for an intergovernmental dialogue to be broadly conceived and
structureda so-called composite process aimed at overall nor-

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malization of bilateral tiesand have sometimes preferred to call

Kashmir simply an issue rather than a dispute. These are relatively minor divergences of perspective that are often deliberately
exaggerated to forestall prospects of intergovernmental dialogue,
and they can be easily reconciled. The focus and mandate of a
permanent India-Pakistan intergovernmental council should probably be comprehensive, rather than focused solely on the Kashmir dispute, but with an understanding that Kashmir is the most
important of a range of bilateral issues and the main focus of efforts.
Such an intergovernmental council should be chaired by the
prime ministers of India and Pakistan, with the foreign ministers
of the two countries possibly functioning as working chairs. The
membership should include, in addition, the president of Pakistan, the president of India (if constitutionally permitted; this ofce is largely titular but carries symbolic clout), the interior and
defense ministers of both countries, the top professional civil servants in both interior and foreign ministries, the chiefs of military
staff of both countries, and selected parliamentarians from the
two sides. Of course, the institutional structures of India and Pakistan differ signicantly. India has a stable model of parliamentary supremacy and cabinet government and a nonpolitical military, while Pakistan is yet to work out a balance in presidentialparliamentary and civil-military relations. The fact that key
decisionmaking lies in different domains in India and Pakistan
needs to be kept in mind but does not in itself pose an obstacle to
effective intergovernmentalism. Two categories of persons could
be given invitee status to such an intergovernmental body (but
without membership): eminent citizens of both countries who
have shown a commitment to resolving their antagonism through
peaceful means; and, at an appropriate point, top ministers of inclusive and autonomous governments in IJK and AJK.

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Far from being a pie in the sky, a joint coordinating body such
as a permanent India-Pakistan intergovernmental council not only
is practically indispensable for initiating and taking forward a serious peace process on Kashmir, but would represent the realization
in concrete, institutional terms of the vision and agenda expressed
in the two most important intergovernmental declarations of the
last thirty yearsthe Simla Agreement of July 1972 and the Lahore Declaration of February 1999. Both these documents constitute forward-looking declarations of principles and concise statements of purpose, agreed at the highest political level after
negotiations on successive drafts presented by the two sides.
During the summer of 1972 in the hill resort of Simla, India,
the Government of India and the Government of Pakistan . . . resolved that the two countries put an end to the conict and confrontation that have hitherto marred their relations and work for
the promotion of a friendly and harmonious relationship and the
establishment of durable peace on the subcontinent . . . reconciliation [and] good neighborliness. The two governments further resolved that the basic issues and causes of conicts which have bedeviled relations between the two countries for the last 25 years
shall be resolved by peaceful means . . . through bilateral negotiations or by other peaceful means mutually agreed upon between
them. With regard to the Kashmir conict, the agreement stipulated that in Jammu and Kashmir, the Line of Control resulting
from the ceasere of December 17, 1971 shall be respected by both
sides without prejudice to the recognized position of either side.
Neither side shall seek to alter it unilaterally, irrespective of mutual differences and legal interpretations. Both sides further undertake to refrain from the threat or use of force in violation of
this Line. It was further specied that this Agreement will be
subject to ratication by both countries in accordance with their
respective constitutional procedures, and the concluding clause

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stated that both Governments agree that their respective Heads

will meet again at a mutually convenient time in the future and
that, in the meanwhile, the representatives of the two sides will
meet to discuss further the modalities and arrangements for the
establishment of durable peace and normalization of relations.11
The promise of that Simla summer was squanderedor more
correctly, never systematically pursuedin part because of the absence of effective intergovernmental mechanisms that could build
and direct the process visualized by the agreement.
The threads were picked up twenty-six years later, in February
1999 in Lahore, Pakistan, in the context of a Jammu and Kashmir
(especially IJK) transformed since 1990, and in the aftermath of
nuclear tests conducted by both countries in the summer of 1998.
The Lahore Declaration issued that winter by the prime ministers
of India and Pakistan is if anything even clearer, and more ambitious, than the Simla Agreement. It bluntly asserts that an environment of peace and security is in the supreme national interest
of both countries and the resolution of all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir, is essential for this purpose. It is
convinced that durable peace and development of harmonious
relations and friendly cooperation will serve the vital interests of
the peoples of both countries. Recognizing that the nuclear
dimension of the security environment of the two countries adds
to their responsibility for avoidance of conict, and reiterating the determination of both countries to implement the Simla
Agreement in letter and in spirit, the respective Governments
agreed to intensify their efforts to resolve all issues, including the
issue of Jammu and Kashmir, and to intensify their composite
and integrated dialogue process (that is, not restricted solely to
Kashmir but with Kashmir as a central issue) on the basis of an
agreed bilateral agenda. Two other principles are signicantly

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mentioned: the governments afrm their commitment to the

goals and objectives of SAARC . . . with a view to promoting the
welfare of the peoples of South Asia, and undertake to promote
and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms.12
The thaw of Lahore lasted only until the summer of 1999,
when elements of the Pakistani military decided to provoke a border conict with India along the LOC in the Kargil sector of
Ladakh, in a misguided and counterproductive attempt to internationalize the Kashmir conict. That did not prevent Indias
moderate Hindu nationalist prime minister from inviting the
person allegedly responsible for the Kargil intrusion, the chief of
the Pakistani army, General Pervez Musharrafwho subsequently deposed the discredited civilian prime minister Nawaz
Sharif in October 1999 and appointed himself president of Pakistan in 2001to a summit meeting held in Agra, India, home to
the Taj Mahal, in July 2001. The meeting proved inconclusive.
Two months later, on 11 September, the World Trade Center and
Pentagon attacks shook the world, and in an altered geopolitical
environment Musharraf s regime was embraced as a key ally by
the United States, which had until then shunned him as a dictator.
This development offended India, which had been steadily improving its own relationship with the only global superpower
during the 1990s, partly at the expense of the traditional U.S. relationship with Pakistan. The spate of dayeen strikes by Islamist
militant commandos against high-prole targets in IJKwhich
began immediately after Pakistan withdrew from Kargil under
U.S. pressureand the deadly strike on Indias parliament in New
Delhi in December 2001 further strained relations, and India reverted to a hard-line stance of demanding that the Pakistani government ensure that cross-border terrorism cease before any resumption of dialogue with Pakistan could be contemplated.

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The Indian government has a valid point with regard to crossborder terrorism, which further destabilizes precarious intergovernmental relations. The Pakistani government also has a partially
plausible case that it cannot prevent all such attacks, that hawks
in India use these attacks as a pretext to destroy the prospect of
constructive intergovernmentalism that could jointly address the
roots of radicalism and terrorism, and that continuous abuses of
the human rights of people in IJK have played a major role in
such radicalization. In the autumn of 2002 the dayeen tactics well
known in IJK since 1999 reached the largest city of Indias western
Gujarat province, when two young men armed with assault ries
and grenades stormed a Hindu temple and cultural complex, killing at least thirty visiting civilians and several police personnel
and Indian commandos before being killed after a twelve-hour
battle. The trigger for this macabre incident was a pogrom against
Gujarats Muslim minority earlier in 2002after the murder of
sixty Hindu nationalist activists on a train by a Muslim mob in
a small Gujarat townin which more than a thousand Muslim
men, women, and children were killed, often in savage circumstances, by organized groups of far-right Hindus in Gujarats cities
and villages.
The road to peace between India and Pakistan passes through
Srinagar. Simla 1972 and Lahore 1999 provide important, abidingly
relevant signposts for that difcult, tortuous road. One of the conditions for a viable subcontinental peace process is, of course, a
cessation of armed hostilities (or something approximating such a
cessation) in IJK. With an India-Pakistan intergovernmental mechanism, an institutional expression of a shared commitment to dialogue and cooperation, in place, the United (Muttahida) Jihad
Council, the coordinating body for all guerrilla groups operating
in Kashmir except Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), would nd it extremely

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difcult to reject a ceasere if they wished to retain any credibility

that theirs is a freedom struggle and not terrorism. In such a
situation, the Pakistani government and military would be under
strong international pressure to ensure a halt to guerrilla activity,
and it is doubtful how long maverick groups like LeT could continue on a violent path if isolated.
All members of the international community with an interest
in the Kashmir conict should therefore invest their efforts and leverage in the development of an India-Pakistan intergovernmental axis in the form just outlined. Intergovernmental cooperation,
and its institutionalization, is not only vital for such short-term
goals as a cessation or near-cessation of violence. In the longer
term, a permanent intergovernmental council can provide the
mechanism for giving the government of each country a reciprocal, consultative role in the governance of the part of Jammu and
Kashmir that is under the effective sovereignty of the other country. That could be an important element in the overall structure of
a settlement, along with Tracks 2 and 3 outlined below.

Track 2: The New DelhiSrinagar Axis

If cooperation on the international dimension of the Kashmir
conict is the essential foundation for any peace process, the internal dimension of relations between IJK and the center of
power in New Delhi is also vital. The democratization of IJKs political and institutional space in a way that can enable lasting peace
is a complex challenge.
In the autumn of 2002 the government of India organized elections, condemned by Pakistan and boycotted by almost all independentist and Pakistan-oriented groups in IJK, to constitute a
new IJK legislature and government for a term of six years. The
rst phase of polling, in the northern Valley districts of Baramulla

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and Kupwara, the Jammu districts of Rajouri and Poonch, and the
Ladakh district of Kargil, was described in Chapter 4. In the second phase, the Valleys capital city, Srinagar, the citys rural hinterland, the adjoining Valley district of Badgam, and the district of
Jammu (which includes Jammu city) elected their representatives.
Participation averaged 59 percent in Jammu district, a predominantly Hindu area, ranging from a high of 70 percent in Chhamb,
a pocket on the LOC which has been the site of erce ghting in
all India-Pakistan wars, to a low of 40 percent in the urban Jammu
West constituency. In the Valley, many came willingly [to vote],
some were forced to come [by Indian security forces], and a majority stayed away. [There was] a genuine urge to vote in parts of
Badgam district, especially in Shia-dominated areas, Ganderbal
and Kangan assembly segments [rural pockets of Srinagar district], army coercion in the Sunni areas of Badgam, especially in
Beerwah and parts of Chadoora [segments], and a near-total boycott in the city of Srinagar.13
This synopsis tellingly captures the local complexity of politics.
About 3540 percent of Badgam districts electorate consists of
Shia Muslims. This community and its leaders are split between
pro-India and pro-azaadi positions, but overall the pro-India element is stronger and the pro-azaadi stance weaker among the
Shias than among the Valleys dominant Sunni population, partly
because of sectarian Shia-Sunni violence in Pakistan, where the
Shia minority has been targeted by radical Sunni groups, some
of which are also active in the war against India in Kashmir. However, 6065 percent of Badgams population consists of Sunni
Muslims, and most of their areas are a separatist and militant
bastion, which includes such villages as Soibugh, home of the
Hizb-ul Mujahideen (HM) commander Syed Salahuddin. Residents of many villages in these areas told of being forced to vote

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after threats and beatings by the ubiquitous Indian soldiers and

special police forces. Kangan, a rural pocket north of Srinagar, is
an area dominated by ethnic Gujjars and a stronghold of Mian
Altaf, a prominent Gujjar National Conference (NC) politician
and former government minister, who has a strong local following. Ganderbal, also north of Srinagar, is a Kashmiri-speaking
area which produced Maulana Masoodi, a legendary NC and Plebiscite Front leader between the 1940s and the 1960s, and in the
1990s produced numerous guerrilla ghters and martyrs. Parts
of this area have a strong HM guerrilla presence, but some people voted nonetheless with the sole motive of defeating the NC
candidate, party president Omar Abdullah (Sheikh Mohammad
Abdullahs grandson). Abdullah suffered a humiliating defeat by
a candidate sponsored by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP),
whose populist campaign against repression and human rights violations struck a chord with the electorate. Indeed, reporting on
the elections, an independent monitoring group called the Coalition for Civil Society, an alliance of local and Indian human and
civil rights groups, observed that most of those who went to cast
their votes voluntarily said that they were doing so either to defeat
the NC or to back a candidate who they believed would address
long-standing issues.14
In the capital city of Srinagar, only 3 percent of the registered
electorate voted, according to Indias election commission. Throughout the day, a deathly silence hung over the city, and there was
hardly any activity in the citys 578 polling stations.15 Virtually the
only sign of activity, apart from police and paramilitary forces omnipresent on the streets, was provided by a few mobile squads of
men owing allegiance to the pro-India NC, who traveled across
the city casting bogus votes at some polling stations. In contrast to
19901995, the peak period of the insurrection, there is no longer

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any overt guerrilla presence or activity in most parts of the city;

however, it is much more difcult to round up residents and force
them to vote in congested neighborhoods of a city of 1.5 million
people than in remote villages in rural areas saturated with Indian
troops. In old Srinagars Eidgah district, where Kashmirs largest
martyrs graveyard is located, a citizen pointed to two thousand
graves of shaheed who have fallen since 1990 ghting for the cause
of self-determination and said: We cannot vote. They stand between us and Indias elections. Ironically, this mass boycott ensured candidates of the deeply unpopular NC a default victory
over their PDP and other rivals in most Srinagar constituencies.
During the campaign for these elections, the NCs father-son
leadership, the incumbent chief minister Farooq Abdullah and
his son Omar, the partys declared choice for the chief ministers
post, had trouble mustering an audience at most of their scheduled public meetings. Some meetings had to be canceled, while at
others security personnel heavily outnumbered the audience,
which consisted of the same group of party activists trucked from
one site to the next across the Valley. At one such rally, held in the
Badgam town of Charar-e-Sharief, site of Kashmirs most revered
Muslim shrine, a disgusted citizen observing the proceedings said:
Enough of this tamasha [farce]. These politicians, especially this
Abdullah family, only want to take from us, never to give anything. Now we have nothing left to give them anyway.16
When Sheikh Abdullahs son and grandson arrived to campaign
in the town of Anantnag, the political nerve center of the southern Kashmir Valley, they found the entire town shut down by a
spontaneous hartal (strike) to protest their visit. As the two southern Valley districts of Anantnag and Pulwama prepared for their
date with Indian democracy in the third round of the staggered
elections, Indian media reported that there is hardly any place

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here where any poll fervor is visible. This was partly because of
fear . . . amid a massive militant [guerrilla] presence, but there
is another reason for the lack of poll fervor here. Participation
in the elections remains an act of treachery against the cause
[of azaadi], the anti-incumbent factor and the wretched [living]
conditions of the people notwithstanding. As a result, there was
little support for either the NC or its main challenger, the PDP.17
In the town of Bijbehara, a PDP stronghold just north of
Anantnag, people said they would resist any coercion [to vote]
by the [Indian] security forces. Look at this old man, Ghulam
Rasool, whose son Hilal [a HM guerrilla] was killed just last week.
Can we betray his blood, said a youth. He said boycott is the rst
option for most people and the second option is to see the NC defeated. There were some, however, who want to vote to get
some respite from routine problems. We are denitely for azaadi
but until it is achieved we want some redress of our grievances,
said a villager in Posh Kreeri village near Bijbehara.
The town of Anantnag was in an uncompromising mood, however. We can have peace only if the Kashmir issue is resolved
permanently, one citizen observed, while another asserted that
we are for azaadi and nobody will come out to vote here. In
Pahalgam, a predominantly rural constituency of Anantnag
district, Mubashir Hasan of Srigufwara village said: So many
have sacriced their lives [for azaadi]. Last time [in 1996] we were
dragged out to vote [by Indian forces] and it may be done this
time as well. Our only interest is to survive the election day in
peace. In the nearby village of Baktoor, Lal Khan, a resident,
queried: What are these elections for? We had expectations that
something might happen at the Agra summit and there would be
an end to bloodshed, but it did not happen. In Kulgam, another
constituency in Anantnag district, for most people, staying away

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from the polls is the rst priority. If it is inevitable [at gunpoint],

the vote will go against NC, a citizen predicted.18
On 1 October 2002 the southern Kashmir Valley voted during
the designated polling hours of 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. As of 1 p.m., with
only three more hours of polling to go, the voter turnout in sixteen constituencies in Anantnag and Pulwama districts, reported
on the basis of Indian election commission statistics in an Indian
newspaper, ranged from a high of 14.88 percent in Rajpora to a
low of 0.85 percent in the town of Anantnag.
In Pahalgam, which recorded a relatively high participation rate
of 13.34 percent at 1 p.m., when mediamen reached [the] polling
station . . . at 11 a.m., National Conference candidate Ra Ahmad
Mir was seen repeatedly punching the buttons of the EVM [electronic voting machine] himself. The village has 1029 votes and
258 had been cast until 11 a.m. The mediamen were [then] forced
out of the station by policemen and election ofcials. Mir was
pitted in a high-prole contest against the PDPs popular woman
leader Mehbooba Mufti in Pahalgam. Elsewhere, security personnel were seen coercing people to vote in Shopian town, and
Pulwama witnessed huge anti-election demonstrations, as
Srinagar city and the other districts of the Valley remained totally
shut down following a hartal call given by the Hurriyat Conference and backed by almost all separatist organizations.19 By
the end of polling at 4 p.m., according to Indias election commission, 26 percent had voted in Pulwama district and 24 percent in
Anantnag district (including a high of 33 percent in Pahalgam
constituency), plus 59 and 56 percent, respectively, in the Hindumajority Jammu districts of Kathua and Udhampur. The aggregate turnout claimed for the four districts was 41 percent; an
Indian newspaper report published on the eve of polling had
noted that on Tuesday, Pulwama and Anantnag in the Kashmir

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Valley, and Kathua and Udhampur in Jammu go to the polls.

Sources said the Government [of India] expects 40 percentplus
attendance.20 On the morning of polling day, a terrorist squad
opened re and lobbed grenades in the town of Hiranagar in
Kathua district, close to the border with Pakistani Punjab, killing
nine people.
In the Kashmir Valley, eyewitness reports in the Indian media
conrmed that the towns of Shopian, Anantnag, Bijbehara, Tral,
Pampore and Pulwama altogether boycotted polling [while] villages in the two districts witnessed low to moderate polling.
However, the low to moderate polling in rural areas came at
a price:
People in Shopian appeared deant and took out several processions shouting anti-election and pro-azaadi
slogans. A mob of 300 protested when [Indian] army
men tried to herd them into polling booths at Bunagam
[village]. Residents of Batapora too said army men
ordered them to vote. In the neighboring villages of
Gagrin, Memandhar, Chanpora, Kanipora and
Alyalpora, too, security forces were coercing people to
vote. Residents of Alyalpora said they were brutally
beaten when they refused to vote. Residents of
Anantnag, Bijbehara and Pampore [towns] complained
that security forces had seized their identity cards [essential for everyday movement] and told them they
would only get them back after they cast their votes.21

Other eyewitness accounts in Indian media also spoke of ghost

towns and rampant coercion of unwilling, protesting voters
herded to polling stations in many villages by Indian soldiers after house-to-house visits, threats, beatings, and orders to vote

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broadcast over mosque loudspeakers. Most such people said boycott was their rst option, but under duress, they were casting
votes for anti-NC candidates to bring about change. Even so,
the bulk of polling centers wore a deserted look, with negligible
to zero voting, while only a trickle of voluntary voters were discernible in most of the rest. There was uncoerced voting, motivated by local loyalties or animosities, in only a small minority of
polling stations, while in a few, small groups of veiled women or
NC men were being allowed to vote repeatedly. At one booth
in Bijbehara, the only vote was cast . . . by a candidate. Scores
of people were massacred by security forces outside this booth
[in 1993], a young man named Arshad remembered. Since I was
born, I have come across only one aspiration, and thats azaadi.
In the town of Qazigund, Naseema, a woman from an adjacent
village who had been herded to vote along with the men,
termed the elections a divine curse. The Coalition for Civil Society, whose four teams of monitors visited one hundred polling
centers, concluded that the third phase of voting stands out for
the spread and extent of violent coercion in most of the sixteen
constituencies in the two districts. Regarding guerrilla threats
to enforce a boycott, barring two places where people reported
that the local commander of a militant outt [HM] had issued
posters that warned those casting their vote of dire consequences,
we did not come across any other form of coercion by militants.
Strangely, in Chandigam [village] people said they would have
boycotted the poll anyway so the poster was redundant.22
Near Awantipora, a town in Pulwama district, seven Border Security Force (BSF) soldiers returning from guarding a polling station were killed when their vehicle hit a land mine. In Srinagar,
the NC leader Omar Abdullah told a press conference that for
settling the Kashmir issue, initiation of a dialogue with Pakistan is

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necessary and added that these polls are only to elect representatives to set up a government in the state [IJK] and whatever
settlement you are talking about is the domain of Islamabad and
New Delhi, and the extent to which elected representatives [of
IJK] will be part of that dialogue is something the Government of
India will have to decide once dialogue starts with Islamabad. In
New Delhi, meanwhile, an unnamed key government functionary asserted that for decades Kashmiris have complained that
they never got a free and fair election. Now they have it . . . This
has been the most violent election [ever] in Kashmir. Pakistan
tried its best to prevent it, but Kashmiris turned out to vote in unprecedented numbers. It only proves our point that Kashmiris believe in India. The morning after the Valleys southern districts
voted, ve more BSF soldiers were killed near Tral, a stronghold
of HM guerrillas, when their patrol vehicle was blasted by a roadside bomb. In IJKs south, two civilians were killed and nineteen
were injured by an explosive device planted in the fuel tank of a
passenger bus near the city of Jammu. IJKs chief of police, who is
not from IJK, attributed escalation of violence to desperation
among terrorist outts since [public] response to the elections has
been spectacularly good.23

As discussed in Chapter 2, IJK has a history of being ruled by compliant cliques, usually of limited representative character or none,
installed at New Delhis behest. It also has a history of its autonomous regime being eroded and virtually destroyed by authoritarian central intervention, operating in collusion with those compliant local elites. What is needed in IJK is the establishment of a
genuinely competitive, representative, and accountable political
framework. This is needed rst of all to ensure a minimum qual-

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ity of governance. Most of IJKs governments have known that

their position, and hence their survival, has depended not on the
will of IJKs people but on the sufferance of New Delhi. Indeed,
on the rare occasions that favored cliques have shown inclinations
to chart their own course, they have been summarily deposed by
actions orchestrated from New Delhi and replaced by less popularly based and more subservient clientsthis is what happened
to Sheikh Abdullahs government in 1953 and to his son Farooq
Abdullahs government three decades later in 1984. Members of
IJK governments, fully aware of this political reality, have typically
spent their time in ofce accumulating personal wealth, by looting development resources and the exchequer, and persecuting
political opponents, aggravating problems of misgovernance and
corruption. These governments have had the paradoxical traits of
being highly predatory and utterly powerless at the same time.
There is a more important reason, however, why IJK needs a
representative and consequently accountable political framework.
Narrowly based governments which have New Delhis patronage
but limited or negligible popular sanction have effectively been
crippled because they have suffered from a chronic legitimacy
problem. Eventually, opposition to such governments, denied normal institutional outlets, became radicalized and assumed an antisystemic form. This was the root cause of the uprising and guerrilla war that erupted in 1990, when the puppet theater disintegrated and the puppeteer, in a tragically self-fullling prophecy,
found itself confronting exactly the kind of self-determination
movement it had always feared.
Given IJKs political circumstances, a framework of government
which has broadly based popular legitimacy is essential but also
extremely difcult to achieve. As matters stand, two of the three
segments of political allegiance and opinion in IJKpro-indepen-

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dence and pro-Pakistanare excluded from institutional politics

and have no recourse except the street (where, until Mufti
Sayeeds liberalizing government assumed ofce in November
2002, their protests were invariably disrupted and broken up by
the police or military) or the gun. Prior to the 2002 IJK elections,
the government of India made signicant attempts to co-opt pliable elements of the Hurriyat Conferencethe conglomerate of
parties and groups espousing self-determinationinto its electoral process. Indian media reported that defectors from the
Hurriyat fold and any others willing to renounce the self-determination agenda would be guaranteed electoral victories. At least
17 of the 87 seats in the [IJK] assembly would be kept aside as safe
seats for such elements.24 The tactic of co-optation was combined with repression directed against Hurriyat Conference elements identied as intransigent. Thus three of the seven members
of the coalitions executive committeethe deantly independentist Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front ( JKLF) leader Yasin
Malik and the pro-Pakistan veterans Syed Ali Shah Geelani and
Sheikh Abdul Azizwere jailed under draconian laws during the
months leading up to the elections.
The twin tactics of co-optation of those willing to play the
game and repression of the rest have been recurrent features of
Indian policy toward IJK for decades. In the 2002 election, consistent with the historical pattern, these tactics failed. Moderate advocates of self-determination like the Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz
Umer Farooq, a young and articulate political-religious gure, and
other seasoned activists such as Shabbir Shah and the purged HM
commander Abdul Majid Dar declined to be co-opted. The only
candidates afliated with the Hurriyat Conference who eventually
contested elections were ve members of the Peoples Conference
(PC) party who stood as independent candidates in the PCs home

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base in the Valley district of Kupwara (and four of them were defeated by their NC rivals, in an outcome against the overall antiNC trend). As explained in Chapter 4, they participated at all
largely with the limited, tactical motive of gaining the upper hand
over the NC in local politics, and they insisted that they had not
renounced the cause of azaadi. Their decision reected a pragmatic quest among a section of IJKs pro-azaadi population to
elect candidates, even if to Indian institutions, who promise to
give voice to the demand for a comprehensive peace process that
will engage the internal and international dimensions of the Kashmir conict. In other areas of the Valley, the PDP was the vehicle
of choice for the expression of this tendency.
As a tactic, this approach makes more sense than holding out
in eternal intezaar (waiting and longing) for a plebiscite that will
never happen. However, it also has serious limitations, and in
itself can never achieve a broadly based, inclusive political space in
IJK. In fact, a decisive majority of the Valleys population heeded
the boycott stance of the Hurriyat Conference and guerrilla organizations such as HM and refused to participate in elections intended to lend democratic legitimacy to Indian-sponsored institutions, while many others participated only under severe duress,
essentially at gunpoint. The Indian governments invitation to
anti-India groups to take part in these elections amounted to
this: We will decriminalize you and include you in the sphere of
legitimate politics, constituted on our terms, if you capitulate
to our power and our perspective on the Kashmir conict.
Criminalization, repression, and exclusion of unacceptable and
treasonous points of view must indeed yield to decriminalization, recognition, and inclusion in IJKs political life. But the
change cannot happen on these terms, which represent a crude attempt to resurrect the pre-1990 puppet theater with the same pup-

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peteer and a somewhat diversied collection of puppets. It can

happen only in the context of a broader peace process committed
to engaging and meaningfully addressing these other dimensions
of the conict:
a role for Pakistan as a party to the dispute
the question of self-rule for IJK
the question of the other Kashmir under Pakistani control across the LOC and its future relationship to IJK.
In Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein and its leaders Gerry Adams and
Martin McGuinness, both former IRA commanders, have neither
abandoned their Irish national identity nor renounced their core
political belief, the ideology of united Ireland. Had advance surrender been demanded or expected, there would have been no
Northern Ireland peace process. Similarly, no Unionists have compromised their British national identity or their preference for remaining part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. As noted earlier, the Northern Ireland peace process
has been based on the premise that both sets of identities are
equally legitimate, and this principle opened up the space for
the crafting of a skillful political compromisewith internal and
external dimensionsbetween aspirations that had for decades
been mutually exclusive. A tacit acceptance of the same sort of
principle is necessary in Kashmir. The path to troubled peace in
Northern Ireland was strewn not just with obstacles and setbacks, including recurrent killings and bombings, but with bitter
distrust and recrimination during negotiations.25 Indeed, Gerry
Adams and the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) leader David Trimble
shook hands with each otherand that too perfunctorilyfor the
rst time only after the Good Friday Agreement had been signed.

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When George Mitchell returned to Northern Ireland in late 1999

to help untangle disagreements that threatened the Agreements
implementation, he noted that not long ago, the Ulster Unionists
and Sinn Fein did not speak to each other directly [even when
in the same room]. In the early weeks of the [1999] review [of
the Agreement] their exchanges were harsh and lled with recrimination. But gradually a reluctant camaraderie developed, and
discussions became serious and meaningful.26
In the 1970s the republican movement in Northern Ireland emphasized armed struggle over political participation; a young Martin McGuinness rst became known as the commander of the
Provisional IRA in Catholic-dominated Derry, the provinces second-largest city after Belfast. By the 1980s, as the limitations of
maximalist rhetoric and armed struggle became apparent, nonviolent political activity assumed greater importance in the movements strategy and Sinn Fein, the IRAs political wing, began to
organize among the working-class Catholic population. The slogan of the movement during that decade was The Armalite [an
assault rie] and the Ballot Box, that is, a dual strategy of armed
struggle and political mobilization. The advent of the peace process in the 1990s strengthened the movements emphasis on nonviolent politics, as did a long series of talks during 19881994 between Adams and John Hume, the widely respected leader of
the Social Democratic and Labor Party, a moderate Nationalist
party based among the Catholic middle class. In 2000 McGuinness
became Northern Irelands minister of education, a key post in
a cabinet headed by the UUPs Trimble. Like other ministers,
Unionist and Nationalist, he took an oath of ofce that pledged to
uphold peaceful politics and to discharge ministerial responsibilities in a nonsectarian manner, working for all citizens of Northern Ireland irrespective of community and political allegiance.

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The moderating effect of a genuine, substantive peace process on

the hard men of the IRA was gradual but eventually remarkable. The IRA had been identied with grim warnings that Not a
Single Bullet, Not an Ounce of Semtex [explosive] in its arsenal
would ever be turned over to anyone. In 2002 the organization
decommissioned some of its weapons and apologized to the
families of civilians killed during the previous three decades.
On the other side of the divide, among the Protestant community, small political parties led by former loyalist (extreme proBritish) terrorists turned out to be among the most dedicated supporters of the peace process. One such gure, David Ervine, who
was elected to the inclusive Northern Ireland Assembly in 1998,
while passionately committed to the [British] union . . . had no
hesitation about talking with Sinn Fein or anyone else in the
search for a society of peace and equality. In 1997 Ervine, a working-class Protestant who has served six years in jail for loyalist terrorism, responded to statements against the peace process made
by the rejectionist Unionists Ian Paisley and Robert McCartney:
Thats easy for you to say, safe as you and your family are in the
[upper-class] suburbs. If theres war [again] its we and our sons
who will do the ghting and dying. We want this process because
its our only hope for peace.27
Violence has a radicalizing effect but it can also have a powerful moderating effect, especially on erstwhile perpetrators. Yasin
Malik, the leader of the independentist JKLF, one of the pioneers
of the armed campaign against Indian rule that erupted in 1989
1990, permanently renounced the gun in 1994. The JKLF, viewed
in the early 1990s as a deadly, fanatical terrorist group, had become
a moderate if still separatist organization by the middle of the
decade, and it is no longer even formally banned by the Indian
government. By the mid-1990s the pro-Pakistan HM, led in the

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Valley by a ruthless commander called Abdul Majid Dar, known

to be a favorite of the Pakistani militarys Inter-Services Intelligence, had supplanted the JKLF as the fountainhead of allegedly
irreconcilable, irrational terrorism. But in August 2000 Dar declared: Even if this violence continues for another ten years, ultimately the concerned parties will have to sit around a table and
nd a solution through talks. So it is better that a serious and
meaningful dialogue begin now, so that further bloodshed is
stopped.28 The Martin McGuinnesses and David Ervines of Kashmir are waiting in the wings, but, like McGuinness and Ervine,
they cannot and will not renounce the core convictions that motivated their struggle.

The core issue in the New DelhiSrinagar relationship can be

summarized in one word: khudmukhtari (self-rule). In the Valley
and some other parts of IJK, such is the historical legitimacy and
popular appeal of the idea of self-government, free of malign control and interference from New Delhi, that even the NC, a subordinate satellite of New Delhi, raises the issue periodically. Prior
to the 1996 elections that restored it to ofce in Srinagar, the NC
demanded the reinstatement of IJKs pre-1953 autonomous regimethat is, the regime in which New Delhi had exclusive jurisdiction only over matters relating to foreign policy, defense, currency, and communications. This was the division of powers
conrmed after negotiations between the prime ministers of IJK
and India, Sheikh Abdullah and Jawaharlal Nehru, in the Delhi
Agreement of July 1952 (see Chapter 2). In June 2000 the IJK assembly, dominated by NC members, passed an autonomy resolution on the same lines. The proposal was received unfavorably in
Indias Parliament, although a few members spoke in support of

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the principle of autonomy as an essential, central component of

any settlement.29 Prior to IJK elections in the autumn of 2002, the
beleaguered NC once again dangled autonomy before a skeptical
public. Campaigning in the Valley, the party president Omar
Abdullah declared that the day is not far when the Central Government will be compelled to restore the autonomy of the State
in order to meet the aspirations of the people.30
The autonomy issue raises complex constitutional questions
pertaining to center-state relations in India, and is a sensitive issue
in both IJK and Indian politics. It is arguably correct that IJK benets from some of the economic, nancial, and legal aspects of its
integration, even if largely involuntary, with the Indian Union
effected post-1953, and it is neither necessary nor desirable that
these aspects be reversed. However, if a rapprochement between
New Delhi and Srinagar is to be achieved, the 1952 Delhi Agreements central principlemaximum autonomy for the local organs of state power, while discharging [IJKs] obligations as a unit
of the [Indian] Unionwill have to be revived. This principle
should be the guiding spirit of the New DelhiSrinagar dimension
of a Kashmir peace process, while the precise content and substantive detail of the design and reinstitutionalization of an autonomous regime in IJK would be matters for negotiation. This
would inevitably prompt chauvinist cries in India about capitulation to fundamentalist secessionists. Nonetheless, a democratically negotiated and reconstituted relationship between New
Delhi and Srinagar, based on the principle of maximum devolution of decisionmaking powers from the center, is entirely consistent with Indias democratic, quasi-federal structure and with the
provisions of Indias own constitution relating to IJK, and is not in
conict with a unanimous resolution passed in Indias Parliament
in 1994 proclaiming IJK to be an integral part of the Union.

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A carefully crafted compromise between the Indian states sovereignty over IJK and maximum autonomy for IJK institutions
would probably approximate the pre-1953 division of powersa
delicate balance destroyed after 1953 by Indian governments intervening through blatantly unilateral, authoritarian, and undemocratic meansin important respects. If in the process IJKs autonomy became greater in some symbolic and substantive ways than
the typical status of a unit of the Indian Union, that would be because no other unit of the Indian Union has such a large segment
of its population estranged from the authority of the Indian state.
The peculiar internal context of IJK and the constitutional history
of its relationship with the Indian Union would justify a degree of
such asymmetry. Indeed, IJK has its own constitution from the
1950s, framed by its own constituent assembly. This is unique because Indias states do not have individual constitutions.
In Chapter 4 I explained why the independentist conception of
self-determination is untenable given realpolitik, the entrenched
interests of states, and the internal social and political diversity of
IJK and of J&K as a whole. Azaadi in a maximalist version is
unrealizable, as well as potentially undemocratic because its territorial xation and plebiscitary basis are insensitive to the views of
large numbers of people in J&K who prefer to live under Indian
or Pakistani sovereignty. However, azaadi subtly redened as
khudmukhtarisubstantial and real self-rule short of sovereignty,
the striking of an honorable balance between the realities of state
power and aspirations to freedomis a sine qua non of any
Kashmir peace process and any settlement. This is especially true
of IJK, but also, secondarily, of AJK.
In the peace process currently under way to end another
bloody, protracted, and stalemated subcontinental conict, the
ethnic war in Sri Lanka, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam

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(LTTE), one of the most violent and radical self-determination

movements in the world, have redened their maximalist stance.
At the rst round of peace talks, held in Thailand in September
2002, Anton Balasingham, the Tigers chief negotiator, said that
over and above the intricate questions of conict resolution and
power sharing that need to be negotiated, the deepest aspiration of our people is peace, a peace with justice and freedom,
a permanent peace in which our people enjoy their right to selfdetermination and to co-exist with others. According to
Balasingham, who has been the LTTEs ideologue for three decades, the Tigers aim to negotiate a restructuring of Sri Lankas
unitary and centralized political framework in a way that will
guarantee substantial autonomy for northeastern Sri Lanka,
the homeland of the Tamils and Muslims. (It is a signicant reformulation of the Tamil nationalist homeland concept to admit that the homeland does not belong to Tamils alone but is
shared with the Muslims.)
Balasingham added that to ght for political independence and
statehood would be the last resort under the principle of self-determination if our demand for regional autonomy and self-government is rejected. In response, the Sinhalese-led Sri Lankan
governments chief negotiator, G. L. Peiris, a constitutional expert
and cabinet minister, asserted that he viewed all aspects of the
peace process as a partnership between the Government of Sri
Lanka and the LTTE.31 In December 2002, after another round of
peace talks, the LTTE announced that it had reached agreement
with the government to pursue internal self-determination for
the Tamil people based on regional self-government and a system of self-rule for Tamil-majority northeastern Sri Lanka
within a federal structure for the country. The LTTEs supreme
leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, publicly conrmed what the Ti-

248

gers called a radical move to clarify the policy orientation of his

organization.32
A self-rule framework for IJK can be devised only through an
all-party forum of talksheld in conjunction with an India-Pakistan intergovernmental processwhich includes representatives
of all pro-India, pro-Pakistan, and pro-independence parties and
groups, from all regions of IJK, who wish to participate. Almost
all independentist and pro-Pakistan factions in IJK would be willing to participate in such a forum, provided it was part of a wider,
substantive peace process addressing the multiple dimensions of
the Kashmir problem. Most factions in IJK who stand for selfdetermination are moderate in their approach and know that a
compromise is inevitable. The occasionally overblown rhetoric of
some of their leaders and their demonization as separatists in
India do not detract from this reality. Indeed, many independentist
and pro-Pakistan leaders and groups might even be prepared to
moderate their rhetoric, replacing controversial terms such as selfdetermination with more innocuous expressions. Of major IJKspecic parties of a pro-India orientation, a forward-looking party
such as PDP would participate with enthusiasm in such a forum,
while NC would be unable to oppose the goal of a broadly
agreed-upon self-rule framework if it wished to retain any political base and credibility. It would be important that at least one of
the two major all-India parties, Congress and BJP (the former of
which has signicant support among Hindus in the Jammu region), be supportive of the talks and of the overall peace process.
The consultations would probably be lengthy, but some time
frame should be set for agreement on a framework. To prevent
such talks getting bogged down in speeches and disagreements,
they would need to be chairedgently and at times robustly
guidedby persons acceptable to a wide range of participants, se-

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lected perhaps from among eminent Indian citizens with a deep

engagement with the Kashmir conict. Once broadly agreed
upon, the proposed framework for self-rule could be placed before
Indias Parliament for discussion and consideration. During a period of post-conict normalization and political transition, lasting
several years, IJK would probably require a broadly based, powersharing transitional government including representatives from each
of the three basic political segments of IJKs population and all regions, ethnicities, and faiths. The experience of peace processes in
other divided societies, such as South Africa, suggests the strong
necessity of such an interim period and inclusive transitional regime before normal patterns of competitive politics can be contemplated.
Opposition to a negotiated self-rule framework would probably
come, with external instigation, from fringe groups in IJK active in
a few Hindu-majority parts of the Jammu region and possibly the
Buddhist-dominated Leh district of Ladakh, plus some migrant
Kashmiri Pandit groups, who are the local standard-bearers for authoritarian central control of IJK and/or the kinds of internal partition schemes, trifurcation or worse, that I analyzed and rejected in Chapter 4. Although these positions are bankrupt, such
fringe groups would need to be taken seriously for two reasons.
First, they seek to exploit and iname genuine fears and legitimate
concerns of sections of the population in the Jammu and Ladakh
regionsespecially Jammu Hindus and other groups like Sikhs
and Ladakhi Buddhists who, it must be remembered, are all minorities in IJKregarding their status, future, and rights. Second,
it is likely that powerful political forces in India, closely linked as
sponsors and backers to otherwise minuscule rejectionist groups
in IJK, would attempt to foster such opposition to sabotage a
peace process.

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tr ack 2a:the srinagar-jammu axis

The most important imperative is to secure broadly based agreement on a self-rule framework between the Kashmir Valley and
Jammu regions, whose population sizes are almost equal (roughly
5 million and 4.5 million, respectively) and which together account
for about 97.5 percent of IJKs people (Ladakh has the remaining
2.5 percent). In the Jammu region, especially but not only among
its non-Muslim, mainly Hindu majority, a perception that IJKs
political life and structure are overly Valley-centric has long been
a source of latent discontent. This resentment has its origins in
J&Ks 18461947 dispensation, when a Jammu-based Dogra Hindu
elite held the Valleys Muslim population in virtual servitude (see
Chapter 1). Allegations of discrimination against Jammu in the allocation of political representation and ofce, government employment, and development resources are often exaggerated,
but the question of equitable interregional relations is nonetheless valid. I have shown why proposals for internal partition (such
as trifurcation) advanced by sectarian groups in Jammu and
Ladakh who seek to cynically exploit interregional differences, are
fatally awed. However, there is one very important variation between the political contexts of IJKs two populous regions: unlike
the population of the Valley, a resilient stronghold of pro-azaadi
sentiment, the bulk of the Jammu regions population belongs to
the pro-India stream of political opinion. The more mature political gures identied with self-determination politics in the Valley,
such as Shabbir Shah, have long been conscious of this basic variance and have worked to promote interregional dialogue with
Jammu.
The issue of interregional variation would inevitably, and justly,
be important in any process of consultation and negotiation in-

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tended to devise a self-rule framework for IJK as a whole. The solution to the problem lies in a framework of self-rule that is multitiered and based on a concept of cascading devolution. It is instructive that some of the most tenacious advocates of varying forms
of self-rule (independence, or autonomy under existing de facto
sovereignties) have been sensitive to the distinct political circumstances and dynamics of different regions. The maximalist vision
of self-determination was presented in 1970 by a veteran independentist ideologue, the JKLF leader Amanullah Khan, who was
born in Gilgit in Pakistans Northern Areas, lives in Rawalpindi,
Pakistan, and has been active in AJK politics for decades. Khan argued for a united, neutral, secular, federal republic of Jammu
and Kashmir encompassing the Indian- and Pakistani-controlled
parts of the former princely state. He noted that justice and equity demand that the State be a federal one to afford full opportunities to the people of its different regions to administer their own
areas and eliminate risks of domination, economic and political,
of any region over others.
To this end, Khan suggested that the reunied, sovereign state
be a union of three regionsKashmir Valley, Jammu, and a frontier region comprising Gilgit and Baltistan (under Pakistani control since 1947) along with Ladakh (which is largely under Indian
control)corresponding to pre-1948 administrative demarcations.
In a classic federalist argument, he contended that each constituent region should have maximum internal autonomy: Each
province [region] is sub-divided into districts and these districts
should have their own internal arrangements. At the center, there
should be a bicameral parliament with the lower house having
representation on the basis of population of different provinces
and the upper house equal representation for each province.33
In 1968 Balraj Puri, a veteran writer, journalist, and political

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activist who lives in Jammu city, presented a working paper to

an all-party forum called the Jammu and Kashmir State Peoples
Convention, convened at the initiative of Sheikh Mohammad
Abdullah during one of his brief spells out of Indian prisons. Puri
proposed a ve-tiered decentralized institutional structure for IJK,
leading to a federation [IJK] within a federation [the Indian
Union]. The tiers would be village, block, district, region, and
state. Puri advised that each of the three constituent regions of
IJKKashmir Valley, Jammu, and Ladakhshould have its own
elected legislature, with authority over matters devolved from the
IJK level of government, and an executive accountable to the legislature. He also argued that the upper chamber of a bicameral
IJK legislature, constituted on the basis of equal representation
for each region, should specically be entrusted with promoting
inter-regional understanding and resolution of inter-regional disputes, and that any legislation intended to amend the constitution of the state [IJK], alter inter-regional relations or change the
overall status of the state, must rst be referred to the upper
house for its opinion. He counseled that the government bureaucracy and development agencies also be decentralized as much as
possible, to regional and subregional levels.34
The matryoshka-doll complexity of IJKs society and politics
poses special but not insurmountable challenges for the engineering of political structures that can accommodate, even if uneasily,
a multitude of conicting allegiances and competing aspirations.
Sound ways exist of narrowing interregional differences, and the
Srinagar-Jammu dimension (as well as the Srinagar-Leh dimension) of IJKs internal tensions can and should be constructively
tackled as subsidiary to the democratic reconstruction and reconstitution of the New DelhiSrinagar relationship. By long-estab-

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lished practice in IJK, Srinagar is the summer capital, where the

government and administration are based for half the year, while
the city of Jammu functions as the winter capital. (This necessitates a so-called durbar or royal court move, a term that reects
J&Ks past as a princely principality, twice a year.)
A framework of multi-tiered devolution can potentially mitigate not only interregional differences but also intraregional differences such as those between the Jammu regions three Hindumajority and three Muslim-majority districts, and those between
the Muslim-dominated Kargil and Buddhist-dominated Leh districts of Ladakh. In fact, the embryo of such a framework already
exists in IJK. A Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council
(LAHDC) was established in 1995 in response to Buddhist demands for local self-government. In late 2002 Mufti Mohammad
Sayeeds PDP-led IJK government expanded the status and competencies of this autonomous body and announced that a similar
council would be established for the Kargil district by 30 June 2003.
There are also plans to set up an umbrella regional authority for
both Ladakh districts, whose chair will rotate between representatives of Leh and Kargil. As noted in Chapter 4, Leh Buddhists had
resumed agitation in 2002, with backing from extreme right-wing
Hindu groups in India, particularly the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh, for separation of the whole Ladakh region from IJK and its
conversion into a protectorate directly administered from New
Delhia move strongly opposed by Muslim-dominated Kargil.
But in late 2002 the leaders of the LAHDC, praising the PDP-led
governments decision to further empower it as historic . . . said
that it will go a long way towards development of the area and in
meeting the aspirations of its people.35
The dispute over Kashmir is a multi-layered problem dened by

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multiple contentious relationships at internal and international

levels, and it requires a multi-track approach geared toward a multidimensional settlement with interlocking parts.

tr ack 2b:the islamabad-muzaffar abad axis

The relationship between the Pakistani state and Azad Jammu
and Kashmir is another internal dimension of the Kashmir
problem. It is far less critical than the New DelhiSrinagar dimension: AJK is a much smaller, less populous, and less diverse area
than IJK, and there is no armed conict between the Pakistani
state and AJK residents. However, as noted in Chapter 2, repression and restrictions on political freedoms and participatory rights
are a serious problem in AJK. Thus:
While criticizing Indias [2002] election [in IJK] some
people in AJK are unhappy with the version of democracy they are served up on their own side of the Line of
Control dividing the territory. Zahid Sheikh [a resident
of Muzaffarabad, AJKs capital] sought to stand as a
candidate of the [independentist] Jammu & Kashmir
Liberation Front in elections to AJKs 48-member legislative assembly in July 2001. His nomination papers and
those of other party colleagues were rejected on the
grounds that they had not signed a declaration stating
that they support the accession of disputed Kashmir to
Pakistan. Sheikh said that elections in AJK are not conducted according to democratic norms. They are not
free and fair. Election laws bar pro-independence people from taking part.36

Like its Indian counterpart in IJK, the Pakistani state is deeply

fearful of the underlying popularity of independentist, unica-

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tionist ideas among sections of AJKs population.37 Hence the exclusion of one of the two basic strands of political belief in AJK
from the arena of institutional politics, which is consequently monopolized by AJK afliates of Pakistani parties and local political
formations, such as the Muslim Conference party, whose loyalty
to Pakistan is beyond suspicion. In order to rectify this situation,
an end to such exclusion needs to be negotiated between Pakistani authorities and the pro-independence groups, coupled with
an end to the use of police methods against activists of pro-independence groups such as JKLF, the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples
National Party, and their youth and student wings. Power-sharing
in AJKs government between pro-Pakistan and pro-independence
parties should be considered, to foster an inclusive and representative political system. In addition, although AJK has acquired a panoply of autonomous institutionsincluding its own constitution and an elected president, legislature, prime minister, supreme
court, high court, election commission, and public service commissionthe operation of this self-government is subject to various forms of intervention and manipulation by Pakistani authorities. Such intervention and manipulation need to be minimized.
As part of an overall, multi-dimensional settlement, it is desirable
that there should be a rough symmetry between the autonomy of
IJK from the federal center in India and the autonomy of AJK
from the center in Pakistan.

nor malization as a prelude to democr atization

The democratization of IJKs political space involves knotty, substantive, long-term issues and would, even in a best-case scenario,
take several years. To build and sustain momentum for the long
haul, tangible normalization measures need to be delivered as rapidly as possible in IJK, a society deeply scarred by continuous

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guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency. These measures relate to

three interconnected areas:
human rights
policing arrangements
political prisoners.
The human rights crisis which gripped the Valley from January
1990 on was described in Chapter 3. After thirteen years and many
twists and turns, ups and downs in insurgency and the war against
insurgency, the situation remains grave, volatile in some areas and
simply grim in others. Some parts of the Valley, including most
towns, are more peaceful than they were during the rst six years
of the ghting, but deeply insecure conditions persist in much of
the Valley, exacting a daily toll of civilians, soldiers and police ofcers, and insurgents in guerrilla attacks and counterinsurgency
operations. For example, in late November 2002 seven Indian
army personnel, three women and two children, and two policemen were killed when the bus transporting them from Srinagar to
Jammu hit a land mine planted by HM guerrillas at the southern
end of the Kashmir Valley. Twenty-three others were seriously injured.38 During the 1990s most of the Jammu region also experienced the spreading of guerrilla war, and some of the worst zones
of armed conict are located in Jammu, in the districts of Doda,
Rajouri, and Poonch, and parts of Udhampur. Much of IJK resembles a huge prison camp, swarming with military and paramilitary
camps, bunkers, checkpoints, and patrols, and citizens feel harassed and oppressed in this environment. The problem is severely
compounded by the fact that the vast majority of Indias army
and paramilitary personnel deployed in the Valley and the war

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zones of Jammu consist of men, mostly non-Muslims, from outside IJK.

As a ceasere or a very signicant reduction of violence leading
toward cessation is achieved, the Indian security presence should
rapidly become as inoffensive and unobtrusive as possible toward
local populations. This means a drastic reduction in bunkers,
checkpoints, aggressive patrolling, and cordon-and-search operations (crackdowns), and redeployment of most army and paramilitary units away from population centers, either to barracks in IJK,
bases outside IJK, or traditional duties of border security. The
longer-term goal must be to strengthen the capacity of ordinary
police forces made up of local residents to carry out routine tasks
of maintaining public order and security with fairness and efciency, and to marginalize counterterrorism police such as the
Special Operations Group (SOG), drawn from among IJK residents including turncoat guerrillas, whose reputation for brutality and criminality has surpassed even the unsavory record of
army and paramilitary forces composed overwhelmingly of nonIJK personnel.
Effective mechanisms for monitoring and enforcing compliance
with human rights standards among Indian security forces are essential. Indias National Human Rights Commission, which under
the leadership of J. S. Verma, a former chief justice of the countrys supreme court, has built a credible reputation as a human
rights defender, can play a major role in this if allowed to do so, as
can IJKs own state human rights commission and its judiciary
(the high court), most of whose rulings and directives on human
rights cases and standards have simply been ignored by the counterinsurgency apparatus for more than a decade. International humanitarian agencies such as the International Committee of the
Red Cross, which has been playing a limited role in IJK since late

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1995, and IJK-based, Indian, and international human rights watchdog groups can also help in improving the human rights environment. An acknowledgment by the government of India that largescale abuses have occurred, and that these are regretted, would
help heal deep psychological wounds. Nongovernmental groups
trying to help widows, orphans, and other victims of the conict
can operate much more effectively after violence ends or is reduced to negligible levels. Special attention should also be paid to
the needs of all persons displaced by the conict, including members of the Valleys Pandit community, so that all who wish to do
so can return to their homes and localities and live with security
and dignity.
The release of political prisoners and an end to abuse of emergency regulations would be an especially important condencebuilding step. During 2002 three of the Hurriyat Conferences
seven executive committee members (the rst-tier leadership) languished in Indian jails, detained under draconian laws such as
Indias Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) and IJKs Public
Safety Act (PSA) primarily to prevent them from mobilizing public
opinion against the Indian-sponsored elections. One of the three,
the religious conservative Syed Ali Shah Geelani, known for his
pro-Pakistan views, is a cardiac patient in his seventies who was
elected thrice to the IJK legislature during the 1970s and 1980s. Another, the independentist JKLFs Yasin Malik, was rst arrested under POTA and severely assaulted by SOG men while in custody.
When the POTA case against him disintegrated as witnesses who
had allegedly incriminated him in money-laundering recanted, he
was rearrested under the PSA, which allows incommunicado detention for two years without any legal process, and denied medical attention needed for urgent health problems.39 Malik was freed
in November 2002 by the new PDP-led government of IJK. These
are the best-known cases, but hundreds of second- and third-

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tier activists of parties and groups favoring self-determination, including known moderates, are also in prison without having
committed or commissioned any act of violence. Some other prisoners who participated in the guerrilla war in its early phase, such
as Showkat Bakshi of the JKLF (also released by the PDP-led government in November 2002) and Mushtaq-ul Islam of Hizbullah,
have been incarcerated since 1990 or 1991, even though their organizations have long forsaken violence ( JKLF) or become defunct
(Hizbullah).
The Northern Ireland peace process not only developed the
three-strand framework that tackles the fundamentals of the conict in all its dimensions. It also established two key subcommittees, one to deal with the issue of decommissioning the arsenals
of republican and loyalist militant groups, the other to address
the issues of reform of the police system, fair and impartial administration of justice, the status of political prisoners, observance of human rights standards, and socioeconomic aspects of
post-conict reconstruction. Any transition from war toward
peace in Kashmir needs to be supported by parallel moves to establish a degree of normalization, rule of law, and a minimally
civil state-society relationship not based simply on zulm (repression). This is precisely the agenda of the PDP leadership, which
in its [election] manifesto . . . promised to repeal POTA, the Disturbed Areas Act, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, disband
the SOG, set up a commission to probe disappearances, release
detainees, and work for the nal settlement of the Kashmir dispute.40 The rst point of the thirty-one-point common minimum
program of the PDP-led coalition government states:
The goal of the coalition government is to heal the
physical, psychological and emotional wounds inicted
by fourteen years of militancy, to restore the rule of

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law in Jammu & Kashmir state, to complete the revival

of the political process begun by the recently concluded
[IJK] elections, and to request the Government of India
to initiate and hold sincerely and seriously, wide-ranging consultations and dialogue, without conditions,
with the members of the [IJK] legislature and other segments of public opinion in all three regions of the state
to evolve a broad-based consensus on the restoration of
peace with honor in the state.41

This is a positive and promising statement of purpose, which

clearly sees liberalizing reforms and normalizing measures
known as the PDPs healing touch policyas steps toward a serious, sustained, and multidimensional peace process (although
PDP leaders are careful not to be publicly drawn, as yet, on either
self-rule for IJK or Pakistans role in a peace process, both highly
sensitive topics in India). But even the near-term part of the
agendaimplementation of the healing touch initiativesfaces
scarcely disguised hostility from Hindu hard-liners leading Indias
coalition government in New Delhi, especially from the home (interior) ministry headed by L. K. Advani, Indias deputy prime minister. The extent to which the top leaders of the Congress party,
whose IJK wing is the PDPs main coalition partner in Srinagar/
Jammu, understand the history, gravity, and complexity of the
Kashmir conict is also questionable, as is the commitment of the
Congress to the PDPs clear, bold, and feasible vision of a peace
process. There is also the threat of violence from hard-line militant groups. In December 2002 one of the sixteen PDP deputies in
the IJK legislative assembly, elected in October from the Valley
constituency of Pampore, was assassinated as he stepped out of
his local mosque after offering Friday prayers.42 Mufti Mohammad

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Sayeed and his top party colleagues like his daughter Mehbooba
and Muzaffar H. Beigh, IJKs nance and law minister, face a situation which is daunting to say the least. But they deserve credit for
attempting to initiate the rst halting steps in the long journey toward peace in Kashmir.

Track 3:The Srinagar-Muzaffarabad Axis

In November 2000 a delegation of citizens from the IJK city of
Jammu visited AJK. Comprised mostly of Hindus, the delegation
included IJKs most senior journalist, Ved Bhasin, and Krishan
Deo Sethi, a veteran political activist, both seventy years old.
Bhasins family is from an AJK town called Bhimbar, and Sethi
grew up in another AJK town, Mirpur. Neither had visited the
Pakistani-controlled zone of Jammu and Kashmir since late 1947.
As the delegation crossed the LOC and entered AJK, its members were mobbed by joyous crowds out to give the visitors from
across the border the warmest possible welcome. Almost buried
under garlands, the visitors were escorted from one town to another, and from one emotional public reception to the next.
Throughout, they heard one slogan being chanted over and over
again: Is paar bhi azaadi, us paar bhi azaadi (Freedom on this side,
freedom on that side).43
I have argued that erasing or redrawing the Line of Control in
Kashmir is neither feasible nor desirable. It is not feasible because
it would violate the bottom-line position on sovereignty and territorial integrity of one or both states involved in the Kashmir dispute. Feasibility constraints aside, it is not desirable because shifting or eliminating the border represented by the LOC not only
cannot provide a solution to the fundamental disagreements over
legitimate sovereignty internal to J&K, but risks a grave exacerbation of local and inter-state conict arising from those disagree-

262

ments. At the same time, I have argued that the cross-border dimension of the Kashmir conict is inevitable because history,
international law, regional geopolitics, and local religious, ethnic,
and political ties all spill across the boundary called the LOC.
Fortunately, ways exist of substantively tackling the dilemma
represented by the LOCthe frontier drawn in blood through
Jammu and Kashmir in 19471948which do not require any
change in existing, de facto territorial jurisdictions of states in
Kashmir. A well-known American policymaker and intellectual,
Strobe Talbott, has spelled out an approach based on three key
principles to conicts over sovereignty and self-determination
in the contemporary world. First, existing international borders,
however contested and contestable, should generally not be
changed by force, either by wars of aggression or wars of secession, as creating small, fractious states out of large, repressive
or failed states may aggravate the problem instead of resolving it. Second, states have a responsibility . . . to ensure that all
who live within the boundaries of the state can consider themselves fully respected and enfranchised citizens of that state. In
some cases, of which Kashmir would surely qualify as one, a
third, crucial element is needed to ensure that self-determination
can ourish without requiring the proliferation of micro-states or
encouraging irredentist conict. The way to make a virtue out
of porous borders and intertwined economies and cultures is
through institutionalization of cross-border economic development and political cooperationwhether between states or parts
of states, or bothan opportunity opened up by globalization
and its sub-phenomenon, regionalization. The most successful
states of the early twenty-rst century, in Talbotts convincing
prognosis, will be the countries that harness these forces and
facts of life rather than deny them.44

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A longer-term Kashmir settlement necessitates that the LOC

be transformedfrom an iron curtain of barbed wire, bunkers,
trenches, and hostile militaries to a linen curtain between self-governing Indian and Pakistani regions of Jammu and Kashmir. Realpolitik dictates that the border will be permanent (albeit probably
under a different name), but it must be transcended without being
abolished in order to meet the aspirations of those, on both sides
of the line, who do not like the LOC, either in principle or in its
present trajectory. This means that self-rule frameworks in IJK and
AJK must be complemented by cross-border institutional links
between the regions under Indian and Pakistani sovereignty. This
will connect the large pro-independence population in areas under
Indian sovereignty with their compatriots across the internal and
international frontier (and vice versa), and the smaller but still
sizeable pro-Pakistan segment to their preferred state, and vice
versa (had a pro-India segment existed in Pakistani-controlled
Kashmir, it would also have had the effect of connecting them to
their preferred state, and vice versa). In the longer run, such crossborder linkages are the solution to the problem of cross-border
terrorism.
In concrete terms, this might mean the establishment of a
cross-border Jammu and Kashmir ministerial council that brings
together ministers from IJK and AJK governments to develop cooperation in areas where it makes sense to do so. (These governments must, to reiterate, have a broadly based inclusive character
during a transitional phase, including representatives of all three
strands of basic political orientation on the Indian side of the LOC
and both on the Pakistani side, probably requiring that these governments be based on internal power-sharing arrangements.)
Such matters, selected from devolved subjects under the competency of these governments, could include aspects of intra-J&K

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trade and commerce, intra-J&K waterways, cross-border transport, environmental protection and preservation, agriculture, cultural matters, and tourism. To begin with, such cross-border cooperation would be modest, with the potential to expand over
time. An inter-entity legislators group could also be established to
provide a cross-border forum for communication and consultation between members of elected IJK and AJK assemblies. Such
institutional links between the two Kashmirs, along with a soft
border that permits the legal, legitimate movement of citizens,
would be the nal element of the institutional architecture of an
overall settlement.
Foreign affairs, external defense, currency and macroeconomic
policy, and some aspects of communications would be likely to remain the exclusive prerogatives of the sovereign governments of
India and Pakistan under such a settlement. On other matters that
remain under the purview of central governments, a permanent
India-Pakistan intergovernmental council can provide the mechanism for each sovereign government to give the other consultative
access to formulation and implementation of policies that relate
to their respective territorial jurisdictions in Jammu and Kashmir.

The framework for peace proposed in this chapter is ambitious,

given entrenched positions and antagonisms. Yet this is the only
viable framework on the basis of which a durable peace can be
built in Kashmir and the subcontinent. It takes full account of the
core concerns of states regarding sovereignty and territorial integrity, and it points to the way in which a modus vivendi can be constructed between the status quo Indian and the revisionist Pakistani perspectives on the conict. At the same time, it argues for
an honorable compromise between state power and popular aspi-

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rations to azaadi as essential for a serious peace process and a genuine settlement. And it points to practical ways of reconciling
conicting aspirations and allegiances within Jammu and Kashmir. This strategic roadmap to peace addresses all dimensions of
the Kashmir conict and shows the way to move beyond the present impasse with a skillfully crafted accommodation that respects
all stances on the conict and rejects none.
A framework such as this would be opposed neither by a relatively moderate regime in Pakistan which happens to be strongly
inuenced by its relationship with the United States, nor by the
vast majority of political groups favoring self-determination
nor, indeed, by some of the most inuential insurgent formations
(such as HM) active in Kashmir. For India, the status quo power
in the conict, negotiating a compromise settlement would liberate enormous nancial and human resources now invested in a
protracted war of pacication and control that cannot be won
militarily, prove Indias maturity and condence as the worlds
largest and most diverse democracy, and signicantly advance Indias well-founded aspiration to be an economic and political
player of global stature. In the event of a military escalation of the
Kashmir conict, India, a huge country of enormous economic
potential, has much more to lose than Pakistan does.
Any agreement on Kashmir should be ratied by the parliaments of India and Pakistan, as well as by any other relevant bodies in the two countries. It should also be put to popular referenda, conducted separately, in the Indian and Pakistani parts of
Jammu and Kashmir. Until the logic of mutually destructive conict is superseded by an alternative logic of a peace process
framed in terms of the universal values of insaaniyat (humanity)
and insaaf (justice), Kashmir will remain a ashpoint of global
concern in a militarized and nuclearized subcontinent.

NOTES

Introduction
1. The ofcial Indian inquiry into the 1999 conict has been published as
From Surprise to Reckoning: The Kargil Review Committee Report (New
Delhi: Sage, 2000). For a different perspective, see All Parties Hurriyat
Conference, Kargil Crisis: Need for Introspection (New Delhi: Kashmir
Awareness Bureau, 1999).
2. Paula R. Newberg, Double Betrayal: Repression and Insurgency in Kashmir
(Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1995), 74.
3. Information from my interviews with surviving JKLF activists from
the early phase of the uprising.
4. 16,000 Terrorists Killed over Thirteen Years, Kashmir Times, 5 Dec.
2002, 1; see also J&K Arms Haul Enough for Two Small Wars, Times
of India, 7 Apr. 2002 (internet ed.).
5. These works are excerpted in Muzamil Jaleel, Dead Poets Society:
People in Kashmir Valley Resort to Poetry to Express Their Pain and
Document Trauma and Tragedy, Indian Express, 13 July 2002 (internet ed.).
6. Sir Albion Bannerji, quoted in Mohammad Ishaq Khan, History of

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268

7.
8.
9.

10.

11.

Srinagar, 18461947: A Study in Socio-Cultural Change (Srinagar: Cosmos,

1999), 191.
Prem Nath Bazaz, Kashmir in Crucible (New Delhi: Pamposh, 1967), 128.
C. E. Tyndale Biscoe, Kashmir in Sunlight and Shade (London: Seeley,
Service and Co., 1922), 77.
Frederick Whelan, Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem,
in J. Roland Pennock and John Chapman, eds., Liberal Democracy,
NOMOS XXV (New York: New York University Press, 1983), 1347.
Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1989), 207.
The broad assessments in this paragraph are based on my extensive
eld research throughout the Jammu, Kashmir Valley, and Ladakh regions of IJK between 1995 and 2002, and on my interviews with JKLF
activists from Mirpur and Poonch, AJK.
William Wallace, Reconciliation in Cyprus: A Window of Opportunity (discussion paper, European University Institute, 2002), 9, 12.

1. Origins of the Conict

1. See Ian Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 19171947
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
2. For the text of the Treaty of Amritsar, see Jyoti Bhushan Dasgupta,
Jammu and Kashmir (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 387388.
3. Prem Nath Bazaz, Inside Kashmir (Srinagar, 1941; Mirpur: Verinag,
1987), 252253.
4. C. E. Tyndale Biscoe, Kashmir in Sunlight and Shade (London: Seeley,
Service and Co., 1922), 7980. Kashmirs most famous king, Zain-ulAbidin, ruled from 1420 to 1470 and is remembered as an intelligent
and enlightened monarch. The mass conversion of the Valleys people
from Hinduism to Islam occurred largely in the fourteenth century,
and Su mystics played a major role in the process. The patron saint
of the Kashmir Valley is the main Su preacher of that period, Sheikh
Nooruddin Noorani. His discourse combined Su Islam with Hindu
Shaivite elements; he is traditionally referred to as Nund Rishi by Val-

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5.
6.
7.

8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.

14.

ley Hindus. See Mohammad Ishaq Khan, Kashmirs Transition to Islam:

The Role of Muslim Rishis (Delhi: Manohar, 1994). Nooranis shrine and
mausoleum, located in a town thirty kilometers from Srinagar, was
gutted by arson in 1995, sparking outrage in the Valley. The Kashmir
Valley was captured by the Mughals in 1586, whose rulers treated it
as a summer resort and laid out the beautiful Mughal gardens of
Srinagar. In 1752 the Valley was overrun by Afghans (Pashtuns), who
held it until 1819, when the forces of Ranjit Singhs expanding Sikh
kingdom captured the region.
Mohammad Ishaq Khan, History of Srinagar, 18461947 (Srinagar: Cosmos, 1999), 193.
Alastair Lamb, Crisis in Kashmir, 1947 to 1966 (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1966), 28.
Khan, History of Srinagar, 192. Rita Manchanda, Guns and Burqa:
Women in the Kashmir Conict, in Rita Manchanda, ed., Women,
War and Peace in South Asia: From Victimhood to Agency (New Delhi:
Sage Publications, 2001), 55.
Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 61.
Lamb, Crisis in Kashmir, 31.
Prem Nath Bazaz, Kashmir in Crucible (New Delhi: Pamposh, 1967), 135.
Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 6162.
Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 66.
Josef Korbel, Danger in Kashmir (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1954), 149.
Control of Hazratbal passed into the hands of independentist JKLF
guerrillas from 1990 until 1996, when they were evicted by Indian security forces amid a bloodbath.
Khan, History of Srinagar, 198. In the early 1990s the aged Masoodi was
murdered in his Srinagar home by pro-Pakistan Kashmiri militants
young enough to be his grandchildren, who regarded any Kashmiri
gure who had had any sort of association with India in the past as a
traitor. Also in the 1990s, Sheikh Abdullahs grave and mausoleum in
Srinagarhe died in 1982had to be placed under the guard of Indian

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15.

16.

17.
18.
19.
20.

21.
22.
23.
24.
25.

26.

security forces to prevent its desecration, in a society that had once regarded him as a deliverer of near-divine stature.
When the NC became the de facto government in Srinagar in late
1947, one of its rst decisions was to name Srinagars central square
Lal Chowk (Red Square) in honor of the Moscow original and the Soviet Union. The decision reected the presence of a sizeable pro-communist segment in the party leadership.
Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 6668, 189. For the text of the charter
of womens rights, see Urvashi Butalia, ed., Speaking Peace: Womens
Voices from Kashmir (Delhi: Kali for Women, 2002), 313315.
Where Is Sheikhs Naya Kashmir? Indian Express, 24 June 2002, 1.
Quoted in M. J. Akbar, India, the Siege Within: Challenges to a Nations
Unity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 227228.
Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 189, 188.
Daniel Thorner, The Agrarian Prospect in India (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1976), 50. Wolf Ladjensky, Land Reform: Observations in
Kashmir, in L. J. Walinsky, ed., Agrarian Reforms as Unnished Business
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 179180.
Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 190.
Ibid., 70.
Richard Symonds, reporting on the Poonch uprising in The Statesman
(Calcutta), 4 Feb. 1948.
Liaquat Ali Khan in a radio broadcast on 4 Nov. 1947, quoted in
Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 107.
Ibid., 95. Some of the commanders were professional military ofcers
who had served rst in Britains Indian army and subsequently in the
anti-colonial Indian National Army, formed in Southeast Asia from the
ranks of prisoners of war captured by the Japanese, and led by the Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose between 1943 and 1945.
The trucks and some weapons were supplied by the government of
Pakistans NWFP.
Balraj Puri, Kashmiriyat: The Vitality of Kashmiri Identity, Contemporary South Asia 4, 1 (March 1995), 57.

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27. Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 113.

28. Ibid., 109. Lamb, Crisis in Kashmir, 4648. A. G. Noorani, The Kashmir
Question (Bombay: Manaktalas, 1964), 61.
29. For the text of this resolution, passed on 21 April 1948, see Dasgupta,
Jammu and Kashmir, 395398.
30. Ibid., 401.
31. For the text of this resolution, see ibid., 402403.
32. Noorani, The Kashmir Question, 68.
33. See Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 220.
34. We have fought four wars over the LOC, Musharraf said in January
2002. He was presumably referring to 19471948, 1965, 1971, and 1999.
Pakistan Cannot Accept LOC as Border: Musharraf, Indian Express,
18 Jan. 2002 (internet ed.). In August 1965 several thousand Pakistani
military personnel, mostly from AJK, supported by some civilian volunteers from the same area, inltrated into IJK to engage in sabotage
and foment an uprising. Pakistani military planners hoped to take advantage of two factors: perceived demoralization in the Indian military after defeat in a border conict with China in late 1962, and serious political unrest in IJK between late 1963 and 1965. The operation
failed; no anti-India uprising occurred in any part of IJK, while many
inltrators were apprehended by Indian security forces on the basis of
information given by locals. The attempt backred further when India
decided in September 1965 not to limit hostilities to J&K alone but instead to broaden the conict to encompass the entire India-Pakistan
border, meaning a full-edged war. In the Kargil sector of Ladakh in
1999, the inltrators were mostly professional soldiers and ofcers of
the Pakistani armys Northern Light Infantry, which is recruited from
AJK and the Northern Areas, supported by some units of mujahideen
ghters. The world community, including major countries like the
United States and China, fearing an escalation beyond limited war, responded by calling for strict non-violation of the LOC. The operation
stiffened Indian resolve instead of compelling India to open negotiations with Pakistan on Kashmir, and it was Pakistan that faced interna-

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tional pressure to withdraw its forces. There were two differences

from the 1965 situation, however. First, the Indians did not opt to
widen the conict to a general war, and this change was attributed by
Pakistanis to their nuclear deterrent against an Indian conventional attack on Pakistan. Second, although India fought its battles on the
Kargil heights in the name of protecting the territorial integrity of
the country and reafrming Kashmirs status as an integral part of
the Indian Union, most people in IJK felt thoroughly estranged from
the battles being waged with such fervor in their name. On the reaction in the Valley, see Muzamil Jaleel, It Was Not Our War, in
Sankarshan Thakur et al., Guns and Yellow Roses: Essays on the Kargil
War (New Delhi: Viking, 1999), 6394. For a synopsis of the Kargil crisis, see Sumantra Bose, Kashmir: Sources of Conict, Dimensions of
Peace, Survival 41, 3 (Autumn 1999), 149153.

2. The Kashmir-India Debacle

1. Quoted in Prem Nath Bazaz, Kashmir in Crucible (New Delhi:
Pamposh, 1967), 136137.
2. For the text of this address see Saifuddin Soz, Why Autonomy for Kashmir? (New Delhi: Indian Center for Asian Studies, 1995), 121139.
3. See A. G. Noorani, The Kashmir Question (Bombay: Manaktalas, 1964),
101.
4. Speeches and Interviews of Sher--Kashmir Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah
(Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir Plebiscite Front, 1968), vol. 2, 13; vol. 1,
1516.
5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origins and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 145146.
6. India Today, 31 Mar. 1987, 26. Khemlata Wakhloo, Kashmir: Behind the
White Curtain, 19721991 (Delhi: Konark, 1992), 321.
7. India Today, 15 Apr. 1987, 4043. According to the prearranged division
of spoils, NC got thirty-eight seats, mostly in the Valley, and Congress
twenty-four, mostly in the Jammu region.
8. Illustrated Weekly of India, 1016 Oct. 1992, 4.

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9. Kashmir: Valley of Tears, India Today, 31 May 1989.

10. See Muzamil Jaleel, Kashmir Town Shows the Way: Polls, Free and
Very Unfair, Indian Express, 27 May 2002 (internet ed.).
11. For the text of the resolution, see Jyoti Bhushan Dasgupta, Jammu and
Kashmir (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 406407.
12. Balraj Puri, Kashmir: Towards Insurgency (Delhi: Orient Longman,
1993), 4549. Noorani, The Kashmir Question, 59.
13. Balraj Madhok, a founder of Praja Parishad and later all-India president of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, Indias Hindu nationalist party now
known as Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), quoted in Dasgupta, Jammu
and Kashmir, 195.
14. In Indias quasi-federal system, there are three lists of subjects: an extensive Union List under the purview of the central government in
New Delhi, a State List reserved for legislation at the level of the units of
the Indian Union (states), which includes such subjects as policing and
education, and a Concurrent List, a gray area of shared jurisdiction.
15. See Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 194.
16. Ibid., 196.
17. Soz, Why Autonomy for Kashmir, 128.
18. Bazaz, Kashmir in Crucible, 151. Since 1948 the district of Poonch
has been divided between Indian and Pakistani zones. The town of
Poonch and a considerable slice of rural Poonch lie in IJK, the rest
across the LOC in AJK. Indias Poonch district has a Muslim majority
of 90 percent, while the district of Rajouri to its south has a Muslim
majority of 65 percent. Most of the Muslims of Poonch and Rajouri
are ethnic Rajputs or Gujjars and Bakerwals, non-Kashmiri speakers
ethno-culturally distinct from the Kashmiri-speaking Muslims who
dominate the Valley and most of Doda. The towns of Poonch and
Rajouri, however, have Hindu/Sikh majorities. While most RajouriPoonch Muslims (like their AJK neighbors across the LOC) are divided
from Kashmir Valley/Doda Muslims by ethnicity and language, they
are also divided from their Hindu compatriots in Jammu by communal cleavages.

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19. See R. K. Jain, ed., Soviet-South Asian Relations, vol. 1: 19471978 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), 34.
20. Syed Mir Qasim, My Life and Times (Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1992), 68
70.
21. Josef Korbel, Danger in Kashmir (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1954), 246. Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 212213.
22. Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 212213.
23. See Jain, ed., Soviet-South Asian Relations, 1520.
24. Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 223224, 222, 224.
25. Puri, Kashmir: Towards Insurgency, 4549.
26. Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 227, 228.
27. Ibid., 226. Noorani, The Kashmir Question, 73.
28. Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 226.
29. For the text of this resolution, see ibid., 408.
30. See Tapan Bose et al., Indias Kashmir War, in Asghar Ali Engineer,
ed., Secular Crown on Fire: The Kashmir Problem (Delhi: Ajanta, 1991),
262267.
31. See Neville Maxwell, Indias China War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970).
32. For the text of this agreement, see Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 389
391.
33. Ibid., 269270.
34. Puri, Kashmir: Towards Insurgency, 4549. M. J. Akbar, India, The Siege
Within: Challenges to a Nations Unity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985),
258.
35. Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 308309.
36. Bazaz, Kashmir in Crucible, 100.
37. Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 323, quoting Indian newspaper reports
of the time.
38. Reeta C. Tremblay, Jammu: Autonomy within an Autonomous Kashmir? in Raju G. C. Thomas, ed., Perspectives on Kashmir (Boulder:
Westview, 1992), 164. Puri, Kashmir: Towards Insurgency, 89.
39. Ibid., 3132. Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 333.
40. Bazaz, Kashmir in Crucible, 100104.

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41. Ibid., 99100. Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conict (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1985), 243249.
42. Akbar, India, The Siege Within, 267. Bazaz, Kashmir in Crucible, 157.
43. Shaheen Akhtar, Elections in Indian-held Kashmir, 19511999, Regional Studies 18, 3 (Summer 2000), 37.
44. Puri, Kashmir: Towards Insurgency, 49. Alastair Lamb, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy, 19461990 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 209
210.
45. Qasim, My Life and Times, 106, 132.
46. Akhtar, Elections in Indian-held Kashmir, 87, citing Keesings Contemporary Archives (1968).
47. Ibid., 3839.
48. Balraj Puri, Jammu and Kashmir: Triumph and Tragedy of Indian Federalism (Delhi: Sterling, 1981), 151. For the text of the 1975 Delhi Accord,
see Qasim, My Life and Times, 138140.
49. This applies to India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. For thirty-eight of Indian democracys rst forty-two years (19471989), the country was
governed by Congress prime ministers belonging to three generations of the Nehru familyNehru himself, Indira Gandhi, and her son
Rajiv Gandhi. In Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistan Peoples Party
(PPP) prime minister on two occasions, is the daughter of Zulqar
Ali Bhutto, former foreign and prime minister. In Sri Lanka, Sirimavo
Bandaranaike succeeded her husband, Solomon Bandaranaike, as
prime minister in 1960; their daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga, became prime minister in 1994 and later president.
50. For more on this critical phase in Indian politics, which directly facilitated the rise of Hindu majoritarian nationalism in India in the 1990s,
see Sumantra Bose, Hindu Nationalism and the Crisis of the Indian
State: A Theoretical Perspective, in Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal,
eds., Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 119124.
51. Achin Vanaik, The Kashmir Problem, Times of India, 18 Apr. 1990,
op-ed page.

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52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

Farooq Abdullah, My Dismissal (Delhi: Vikas, 1985), 12.

Akhtar, Elections in Indian-held Kashmir, 32.
Interviewed in India Today, 30 Nov. 1986.
M. J. Akbar, quoted in Engineer, ed., Secular Crown on Fire, 291.
India Today, 15 Apr. 1987, 4043.
India Today, 15 Nov. 1986, 43, and 30 Apr. 1990, 10.
Personal information from JKLF sources.
Puri, Kashmir: Towards Insurgency, 5657; Kashmir: Valley of Tears,
India Today, 31 May 1989.
Philippe Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, What Democracy Is . . . and
Is Not, in Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner, eds., The Global Resurgence of Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993),
3952.
Courtney Jung and Ian Shapiro, South Africas Negotiated Transition:
Democracy, Opposition and the New Constitutional Order, Politics
and Society 23, 3 (Sept. 1995), 271273.
Juan Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown
and Re-equilibration (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978),
2833.
Interview with Amanullah Khan in The Statesman (Calcutta), 28 Apr.
2002. Leo Rose, The Politics of Azad Kashmir, in Thomas, ed., Perspectives on Kashmir, 238. For a survey of AJKs politics between 1947
and 1965, see Dasgupta, Jammu and Kashmir, 231248. Dasguptas
account highlights two features: endemic factionalism within AJKs
semi-feudal elite, and the Pakistani states strict control of AJK politics.
Rose covers more recent developments.
On these concepts, see Eric Nordlinger, Soldiers in Politics: Military
Coups and Governments (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1977), 2129.

3. The War in Kashmir

1. Times of India (Delhi), 6 May 1990.
2. Muzamil Jaleel, I Am Going at the Call of Allah and Doing What Allah Has Made Our Farz, Indian Express, 25 Nov. 2001 (internet ed.).

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3. See Tapan Bose et al., Indias Kashmir War, in Asghar Ali Engineer,
ed., Secular Crown on Fire: The Kashmir Problem (Delhi: Ajanta, 1991), 261.
4. Ibid., 229230.
5. Hameeda Bano, speaking in April 1994, quoted in Victoria Schoeld,
Kashmir in Conict (London: Tauris, 1996), 231.
6. India Today, 30 Apr. 1990, 13.
7. Ayesha Kagal, Accidental Terrorists, Times of India, 29 Apr. 1990.
8. India Week (Delhi), 24 Aug. 1990.
9. Edward Desmond, The Insurgency in Kashmir, 198991, Contemporary South Asia 4, 1 (Mar. 1995), 13. Militancy in Kashmir Valley Completes Fourteen Years, Kashmir Times, 1 Aug. 2002 (internet ed.); Amnesty International, If They Are Dead Tell Us: Disappearances in Jammu
and Kashmir (London: Amnesty International, Feb. 1999).
10. Muzamil Jaleel, BSFs Men Gang-Rape 17-Year-Old in Valley, Family
Made to Watch, Indian Express, 20 Apr. 2002, 1. The victim was a
Gujjar girl in a mountain hamlet near Pahalgam, in the southern part
of the Valley.
11. For documentation of the human rights crisis during the intifada
phase, see Amnesty International, India: Torture and Deaths in Custody
in Jammu and Kashmir (London: Amnesty International, Jan. 1995),
which details 715 cases of summary executions and deaths under torture since 1990; Asia Watch, Kashmir under Siege (New York: Human
Rights Watch, May 1991); Asia WatchPhysicians for Human Rights,
Rape in Kashmir: A Crime of War (New York: Human Rights Watch,
June 1993); Asia WatchPhysicians for Human Rights, The Human Rights
Crisis in Kashmir: A Pattern of Impunity (New York: Human Rights Watch,
June 1993); Fdration Internationale des Ligues des Droits de lHomme,
Kashmir: A People Terrorized (Paris, Aug. 1993); Committee for Initiative
on Kashmir, Kashmir: A Land Ruled by the Gun (Delhi, Dec. 1991);
Saqina Hasan, Primila Lewis, Nandita Haksar, and Suhasini Mulay,
Kashmir Imprisoned (Delhi: Committee for Initiative on Kashmir, July
1990), an investigation into conditions for women in the Valley; Bose
et al., Indias Kashmir War, 224270; and Peoples Union for Civil

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278

12.
13.
14.

15.
16.
17.

18.
19.
20.
21.

22.
23.

Liberties, Report on Kashmir Situation, ibid., 210223. A useful compilation of reports that appeared during 1990 in newspapers and magazines worldwide is A. R. Minhas and Mustahsan Aqil, Kashmir: Cry
Freedom (Mirpur: Kashmir Record and Research Cell, 1991).
India Today, 31 Jan. 1990. Illustrated Weekly of India, 1016 Oct. 1992, 6.
Hindustan Times, 29 Aug. 2001 (internet ed.).
Hizb-ul Mujahideen behind Army Convoy Ambush, Times of India,
25 Nov. 2001 (internet ed.); Army Commanding Ofcer, Bodyguards Killed in Blast, Kashmir Times, 20 Aug. 2002 (internet ed.);
Securitymen Retaliate with Vengeance: 130 Houses Torched, Villagers Tortured, Scores Missing, Kashmir Times, 23 Aug. 2002 (internet
ed.). Shakeel Ansaris brother Farooq Ansari, also a militant, was killed
in a shootout with Indian forces in 2000. Shakeel was injured in that
encounter but escaped.
Bose et al., Indias Kashmir War, 261.
See Sumantra Bose, The Challenge in Kashmir: Democracy, Self-Determination and a Just Peace (New Delhi: Sage, 1997), 7879.
Amitabh Mattoo, writing in the Illustrated Weekly of India, 1016 Oct.
1992, 10. Mattoos parents, eminent citizens of Srinagar, have continued to live there throughout the troubles.
Khemlata Wakhloo and O. N. Wakhloo, Kidnapped: 45 Days with Militants in Kashmir (Delhi: Konark, 1993), 396.
For such allegations see Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Genocide of
Hindus in Kashmir (Delhi: Suruchi Prakashan, 1991).
India Today, 28 Feb. 1993, 2225.
15,000 Pandits Throng Khir Bhawani Temple: Muslims Greet Pilgrims, Serve Eatables, Kashmir Times, 18 June 2002 (internet ed.);
Kashmiri Pandits Throng Ramji Temple after 13 Years, Hindustan
Times, 21 Apr. 2002 (internet ed.).
See Amanullah Khan, Free Kashmir (Karachi: Central Printing Press, 1970).
Zargar was captured by Indian forces in 1992. In December 1999 he
was one of three jailed militants released by the Indian government
in exchange for the freedom of 160 hostages after a group of Pakistani

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24.

25.
26.
27.

28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.

36.
37.

religious radicals hijacked an Indian Airlines plane ying from

Kathmandu to Delhi to Kandahar, then the nerve center of the
Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The others released were Ahmed
Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British citizen of Pakistani origin, who in 2002
was sentenced to death in Pakistan for his role in the January 2002 kidnapping and murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in
Karachi, and Maulana Masood Azhar, a radical Pakistani cleric captured by Indian forces in the Kashmir Valley in 1994.
This sequence of events is reconstructed on the basis of my interviews with leading JKLF activists from IJK and AJK, supported by my
own eld research in IJK.
See note 23.
John Rettie and Ghulam Nabi Khayal, Kashmiris Round on Pro-Pakistan Groups, Guardian (London), 22 June 1994, 11.
An Institute of Kashmir Studies report, Catch and Kill (Srinagar, 1993)
details 118 such cases. IKS is afliated with the conservative religious
party Jamaat-I-Islami, which in turn is the political afliate of the
guerrilla organization Hizb-ul Mujahideen.
A. G. Noorani, The Tortured and the Damned: Human Rights in
Kashmir, Frontline, 28 Jan. 1994, 4448.
My information from reliable sources.
See India Today, 29 Feb. 1992, 15; 15 Mar. 1992, 3132.
India Today, 31 May 1993, 27.
Ved Bhasin, editor-in-chief of the Kashmir Times, a daily newspaper
published in Jammu.
Conclusions based on my research and personal information.
Rettie and Khayal, Kashmiris Round on Pro-Pakistan Groups.
Desmond, Insurgency in Kashmir, 1112. Paula R. Newberg, Double
Betrayal: Repression and Insurgency in Kashmir (Washington: Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, 1995), 73.
See Human Rights Watch, Indias Secret Army in Kashmir (New York:
HRW, 1996).
Four RR formations of approximately ten thousand soldiers each op-

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38.
39.

40.
41.

42.

43.
44.

45.

erate in designated zones of responsibility in northern Valley districts

(Kilo Force), southern Valley districts (Victor Force), Doda-Kishtwar in
Jammu (Delta Force), and Rajouri-Poonch in Jammu (Romeo Force).
Commentary in Greater Kashmir, Apr. 28, 2002.
See Bose, The Challenge in Kashmir, 152170, and Shaheen Akhtar, Elections in Indian-held Kashmir, 19511999, Regional Studies 18, 3 (Summer 2000), 4961.
Three Cops, Hizb Terrorist Killed in J&K Encounter, Hindustan
Times, 9 Sept. 2002.
For the text of the Lahore Declaration, see www.indianembassy.org/
South_Asia/Pakistan/lahoredeclaration.html. For Indian and Pakistani
perspectives on the nuclear dimension, see Raju G. C. Thomas and
Amit Gupta, eds., Indias Nuclear Security (Boulder and London: Lynne
Rienner, 2000); Lieutenant-General Kamal Matinuddin, The Nuclearization of South Asia (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Rear
Admiral Raja Menon, A Nuclear Strategy for India (New Delhi: Sage,
2000). For American perspectives, see George Perkovich, Indias Nuclear
Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Ashley J. Tellis, Indias Emerging Nuclear Posture:
Between Recessed Deterrent and Ready Arsenal (Santa Monica: Rand, 2001).
On the reaction in the Valley, see Muzamil Jaleel, It Was Not Our
War, in Sankarshan Thakur et al., Guns and Yellow Roses: Essays on the
Kargil War (Delhi: Viking, 1999). On the mood in the Kargil district immediately after the ghting, see Shujaat Bukhari, The Battle Is a NonIssue, The Hindu, 3 Sept. 1999. The 1965 and 1999 Pakistani incursions
into IJK are compared in Chapter 1, note 34.
Kashmir Times, 1 Dec. 2002 (internet ed.).
JeM was launched under the leadership of Maulana Masood Azhar in
early 2000, immediately after his release from Indian captivity in the
circumstances described in note 23.
For analysis of the doctrinal roots of suicidal warfare in Kashmir and
its parallels with historical and contemporary political movements, see
Muzamil Jaleels articles Where Death Is the Weapon, and the Mes-

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46.

47.

48.
49.
50.
51.

52.
53.

54.

sage, Martyrdom: The Prize for Taking Ones Life, and The Fight
to the Finish, at www.expressindia.com/kashmir/kashmirlive. For an account of the development of dayeen tactics in the Kashmir insurgency, see Masood Hussain, Kashmir Separatists Remonstrate against
Guest Militants, Kashmir Times, 23 Dec. 2001.
Hizb Says Jammu Massacre Un-Islamic, Suspects Foreign Hand,
United News of India (UNI) report carried in the Kashmir Times, 20
July 2002 (internet ed.).
For an analysis in historical and comparative perspective of the Tamil
Tigers conception of martyrdom and their practice of suicidal violence, see Sumantra Bose, States, Nations, Sovereignty: Sri Lanka, India
and the Tamil Eelam Movement (New Delhi: Sage, 1994), 117128.
LeT Fidayeen Strike at CRPF Camp, Two Ultras Dead: Six Jawans
Killed, Nine Hurt in Srinagar Attack, Kashmir Times, 23 Nov. 2002, 1.
NC Caught in Gujjar Web in Rajouri, Poonch, Kashmir Times, 14
Aug. 2002 (internet ed.).
Prem Nath Bazaz, Kashmir in Crucible (New Delhi: Pamposh, 1967),
105106.
Daily Excelsior ( Jammu), 19 Sept. 2000, 1. 572 Ultras Killed in RajouriPoonch So Far This Year, Hindustan Times, 31 Oct. 2001 (internet ed.).
12 Ultras Killed in Rajouri-Poonch Encounters, Kashmir Times, 29
Apr. 2002, 1.
LeT, JeM, HM Form Joint Panel in Jammu, Kashmir Images
(Srinagar), 29 Apr. 2002, 1.
Pradeep Dutta, At This School, Its To Sir with Love and Terror, Indian Express, 28 Nov. 2001 (internet ed.). Militants Kill Judge, Three
Others in Kashmir, Indian Express, 5 Dec. 2001 (internet ed.). Nine
Villagers Killed in Rajouri Encounter, Army Faces Public Rage, Indian Express, 22 Jan. 2002 (internet ed.). Target Army HQ: Rajouri Police Recover Rocket Shells, Kashmir Times, 18 Feb. 2002 (internet ed.).
Army Captain, Four Terrorists Killed in Rajouri, Hindustan Times, 1
Aug. 2002 (internet ed.).
Major, JCO among 11 Soldiers Killed in Surankote Encounter, Kash-

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55.

56.

57.
58.
59.

60.

61.

62.
63.

mir Times, 28 Nov. 2001 (internet ed.). Seven Ultras, Major among Ten
Killed in Surankote Encounters, Kashmir Times, 14 July 2002 (internet
ed.). Army Captain, Two Cops Killed in Militant Ambush, Kashmir
Times, 31 July 2002 (internet ed.). Two Civilians Killed in Surankote,
Kashmir Times, 18 Aug. 2002. Seven JeM Terrorists Gunned Down in
Poonch, Hindustan Times, 8 Aug. 2002 (internet ed.).
Kashmir Images, 30 Apr. 2002, 1. Militants Kill Four of Cops Family in
Jammu, Indian Express, 26 Aug. 2002 (internet ed.). Terrorists Spray
Bullets at J&K Bus Stand, Kill 12, Hindustan Times, 11 Sept. 2002 (internet ed.); Three More BSF Men Dead, Surankote Toll 16, Kashmir
Times, 13 Sept. 2002 (internet ed.).
Two Priests among Nine Killed in J&K, Times of India, 29 Aug. 2001
(internet ed.). Nine Killed in Jammu, Times of India, 18 May 2002
(internet ed.). Four Civilians Killed in Ambush, Kashmir Times, 7
Nov. 2002, 1.
Greater Kashmir, 28 Apr. 2002.
Top LeT Militant among Four Ultras Killed in Valley, Hindustan
Times ( J&K edition), 29 Apr. 2002.
Five Policemen Injured as Militants Attack Kashmir Ministers
House, Hindustan Times, 25 June 2002 (internet ed.). Terrorists Kill
J&K Minister, Hindustan Times, 11 Sept. 2002 (internet ed.).
Muzamil Jaleel, Militants Spray Bullets at Funeral, Indian Express, 13
Sept. 2002 (internet ed.); Masood Hussain, Lones Burial Marked by
Firing, Encounter in Lolab: Two Soldiers, Militant Killed in Battle,
Kashmir Times, 13 Sept. 2002 (internet ed.).
Nine Militants, Soldier Killed in Valley, Kashmir Times, 20 July 2002
(internet ed.). Army Foils Fresh Inltration Bid in Kupwara,
Hindustan Times, 29 July 2002 (internet ed.). Six Killed in Kashmir,
Kashmir Times, 18 Aug. 2002 (internet ed.).
1052 Terrorists Killed in 2002, Kashmir Times, 20 Aug. 2002.
NCs Likely Poll Candidate Gunned Down, Kashmir Times, 1 Aug.
2002 (internet ed.). NC Zonal President Shot Dead in Valley, Kashmir
Times, 8 Aug. 2002.

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64. Statesman (Calcutta), 7 Sept. 2000, 1.

65. We Are in Danger: J&K Ultras, Indian Express, 18 Nov. 2001 (internet ed.).
66. Musharraf Forced Us to Close Terror Camps in PoK: Militants, Indian Express, 29 July 2002. See also Zahid Hussain, Pakistans Link
Man with Kashmir Militants Sacked, Times (London), 29 June 2002
(internet ed.). The purged ofcer was ISIs Brigadier Abdullah, head of
the agencys Kashmir operations.
67. Nobody Can Stop Us from Entering J-K: Militants, Indian Express, 27
Aug. 2002.

4. Sovereignty in Dispute
1. Statement of the External Affairs Ministry, Government of India, New
Delhi, Jan. 1994.
2. Mirpur Declaration of JKLF, 5 Jan. 1995. The fth of January is observed as third option/right to independence day, the anniversary of
a UNCIP statement of 1949 that resolved to establish a plebiscite administration in Jammu and Kashmir.
3. See Amanullah Khan, India v/s India (Rawalpindi: JKLF, 1991), 910.
Khan is one of the founders of the JKLF movement. The same proposal for a three-way plebiscite, to be decided by a simple majority,
was made in January 1994 by Raja Mohammad Muzaffar, then senior
vice president of the AJK-based JKLF, to a meeting on Kashmir organized by the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington.
4. Leo Rose, The Politics of Azad Kashmir, in Raju G. C. Thomas, ed.,
Perspectives on Kashmir (Boulder: Westview, 1992), 251.
5. David Butler and Austin Ranney, Referendums: A Comparative Study of
Practice and Theory (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1978), 36.
6. See Sumantra Bose, Bosnia after Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Steven
Burg and Paul Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conict
and International Intervention (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1999).
7. Musharraf Rules out Conversion of LOC into Border, Hindustan
Times, 12 Sept. 2002 (internet ed.).

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8. India to Welcome Proposal to Turn LOC into Border, Statesman, 7

Sept. 2002, 1.
9. Pakistan Cannot Accept LOC as Border: Musharraf, Indian Express,
18 Jan. 2002 (internet ed.). Musharraf apparently put forward the same
outline to Indian leaders during a visit to India in July 2001. He reiterated it during a talk show on the BBCs international television network, Question Time Pakistan, in September 2002.
10. For example, Gowher Rizvi, South Asia in a Changing International Order (New Delhi: Sage, 1993), 8086. Rizvi suggests an independent state
comprising the Valley and the Azad Kashmir districts which are under Pakistani control.
11. See John McGarry, Orphans of Secession: National Pluralism in Secessionist Regions and Post-Secession States, in Margaret Moore, ed.,
National Self-Determination and Secession (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998), 215232.
12. Kashmir Study Group, Kashmir: A Way Forward (Larchmont, N.Y., Jan.
2000).
13. One Killed, Thirteen Injured in Kishtwar Grenade Attack, Kashmir
Times, 19 Feb. 2002 (internet ed.).
14. See Sumantra Bose, Hindu Nationalism and the Crisis of the Indian
State: A Theoretical Perspective, in Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal,
eds., Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 104164; and Thomas Blom
Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern
India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
15. Divide J&K into Four Parts, Create Separate Enclave for Pandits:
VHP, Hindustan Times, 23 June 2002 (internet ed.). The VHP rose to
prominence in the 1990s as the spearhead of the Hindu sectarian
movements campaign to destroy a sixteenth-century mosque in the
town of Ayodhya, northern India, and replace it with a Hindu temple.
The mosque was razed by organized mobs of Hindu zealots in December 1992, sparking communal violence across India. The controversy is still an inammatory and destabilizing issue in Indian politics.

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16.
17.

18.

19.
20.

21.
22.
23.

24.

25.
26.

See S. Gopal, ed., Anatomy of a Confrontation: The RamjanambhoomiBabri Masjid Dispute (Delhi: Penguin India, 1991).
Pradeep Kaushal, Split J-K into Three Parts, Says RSS, Indian Express,
1 July 2002 (internet ed.).
No Trifurcation of J&K: Advani, Hindustan Times, 3 July 2002 (internet ed.). The RSS is the parent organization of Indias Hindu sectarian
movement and deputes its members to lead all other organizations
which constitute the movement, including the BJP (both Advani and
the prime minister, Vajpayee, are RSS veterans).
Kaushal, Split J-K into Three Parts. Pradeep Kaushal, Split J&K:
RSS Takes It Forward, Indian Express, 13 July 2002. Zafar Choudhary,
BJP Manifesto Reiterates Article 370 Abrogation, Kashmir Times, 14
Sept. 2002 (internet ed.).
Personal information from sources in Leh.
This group, which calls itself Pannun Kashmir, has reputedly been patronized since its formation in the early 1990s by elements of the Indian federal governments interior ministry, and receives considerable
publicity in sections of the Indian media. See the report on its activities in Sunday (Calcutta), 2329 Jan. 1994, 7074.
Prem Nath Bazaz, Kashmir in Crucible (New Delhi: Pamposh, 1967), 151.
Muzaffar Raina, All Parties in Kargil Oppose RSS Demand for
Trifurcation, Kashmir Times, 13 Aug. 2002 (internet ed.).
Nicholas Sambanis, Partition as a Solution to Ethnic War: An Empirical Critique of the Theoretical Literature, World Politics 52 ( July
2000), 437483. Bose, Bosnia after Dayton, ch. 4.
On the destabilizing and antidemocratic implications of the doctrine of self-determination in the contemporary, post-bipolar world,
see Donald Horowitz, Self-Determination: Politics, Philosophy and
Law, in Moore, ed., National Self-Determination, 181214.
Polling amidst Mixed Reaction in Valley, Kashmir Times, 17 Sept. 2002
(internet ed.).
J&K Voters Say They Were Forced to Vote, AFP dispatch, Srinagar,
16 Sept. 2002.

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27. Mufti Islah, Tariq Mir, and Nazir Masoodi, 1st Day, 1st Show: No Hit
but Surely Not a Flop, Indian Express, 17 Sept. 2002 (internet ed.).
Polling amidst Mixed Reaction, Kashmir Times.
28. Muzamil Jaleel, Some Places Army Rushed in Where It Didnt Have
to Tread, Indian Express, 17 Sept. 2002 (internet ed.).
29. Protesters Burn Jeep of Ruling Party Candidate, Indian Express, 17
Sept. 2002 (internet ed.).
30. Only 2,546,913 citizens were registered to vote for these elections in
the Kashmir Valley, whose population is over 5 million (all citizens
aged eighteen and over are eligible to vote); 2,892,290 were registered
in the Jammu region, which has a population of about 4.5 million.
Jammu Region Has More Voters Than Kashmir Valley, Hindustan
Times, 25 Aug. 2002 (internet ed.). Voter registration did not pick up
despite attempts by Indian security forces to intimidate citizens into
acquiring voter cards; see Muzamil Jaleel, Only the Voter ID Counts
in Valley Now, Indian Express, 12 Aug. 2002 (internet ed.).
31. Muzamil Jaleel, Azaadi and Election in Same Breath: Lone Associate
to Contest, Gets Red Carpet, Indian Express, 30 Aug. 2002 (internet
ed.). For more on Sos role and antecedents in Handwara politics, see
Chapter 2.
32. Sayeeds other daughter, Rubaiya, was kidnapped by independentist
JKLF militants in December 1989, when her father was Indias interior
minister; see Chapter 3.
33. Nazir Masoodi and Mufti Islah, Four Villages and a Hurriyat DoveHawk Divide, Indian Express, 17 Sept. 2002 (internet ed.).
34. Tariq Mir, 22-Year-Old Votes for Peace, Indian Express, 17 Sept. 2002.

5. Pathways to Peace
1. Indo-Pak Tension Major Threat to World Peace: Annan, Hindustan
Times, 12 Sept. 2002 (internet ed.). Bush, Annan Hold Talks on Kashmir Issue, AFP dispatch, New York, 13 Sept. 2002.
2. Kashmir Chocolate Ad Angers BJP, AFP dispatch, New Delhi, 20
Aug. 2002.

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3. Arun Sharma, A Child without a Father Gets a Country in Jammu &

Kashmir, Indian Express, 3 Aug. 2002, 1; Shehnaz Symbolizes Tragedy
of the Two Kashmirs, Kashmir Times, 3 Aug. 2002, 1. See also Masood
Hussain, NC Governments Double-Standards on Mirpuri Womans
Case, Kashmir Times, 20 Aug. 2002, 1; Yamini Kaul, Freedom Still
Eludes Released Shehnaz, Kashmir Times, 8 Aug. 2002, 1; ShehnazMobeen Detention Case: Court Orders Release, Compensation, Stay
in India of Pakistani Lady, Kashmir Times, 3 Aug. 2002, 1; and Irm
Amin Beig, Born in Jail, Question Mark on Mobeens Nationality,
Kashmir Times, 20 July 2002 (internet ed.).
4. Robert Kee, Ireland: A History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson,
1980), 248. For useful overviews of the Northern Ireland question, see
Brendan OLeary and John McGarry, The Politics of Antagonism: Understanding Northern Ireland (London: Athlone, 1996), and John Darby,
Scorpions in a Bottle: Conicting Cultures in Northern Ireland (London:
Minority Rights Group, 1997). On the reemergence of the IRA and its
political wing, Sinn Fein, see Patrick Bishop and Eamonn Mallie, The
Provisional IRA (London: Heinemann, 1987).
5. Bertie Ahern, Prime Minister of the Republic of Ireland, speaking in
January 2000, quoted in Padraig OMalley, Northern Ireland and
South Africa: Hope and History at a Crossroads, in John McGarry,
ed., Northern Ireland and the Divided World: Post-Agreement Northern Ireland in Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001),
301. For the text of the Good Friday Agreement, and reportage, commentary, and analysis on the peace process, see the Irish Times website,
www.ireland.com/special/peace. For dissections of the historical context, structure, nuances, and implications of the peace-building framework, see Brendan OLeary, The Nature of the British-Irish Agreement, New Left Review ( Jan.Feb. 1999), 6696; and Brendan OLeary,
Comparative Political Science and the British-Irish Agreement, in
John McGarry, ed., Northern Ireland and the Divided World: Post-Agreement Northern Ireland in Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 5388.

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6. OLeary, Comparative Political Science, 63.

7. See Antony Alcock, From Conict to Agreement in Northern Ireland: Lessons from Europe, in McGarry, ed., Northern Ireland and the
Divided World, 159180.
8. See George J. Mitchell, Making Peace (New York: Knopf, 1999).
9. John McGarry, Northern Ireland, Civic Nationalism, and the Good
Friday Agreement, 128; OLeary, Comparative Political Science, 53, 82.
10. See Edward W. Said, The End of the Peace Process (London: Granta
Books, 2002).
11. For the text of the Agreement, see P. R. Chari and Pervaiz Iqbal
Cheema, The Simla Agreement, 1972: Its Wasted Promise (Delhi:
Manohar, 2001), 204206.
12. For the text of the Lahore Declaration, see www.indianembassy.org/
South_Asia/Pakistan/lahoredeclaration.html.
13. Muzamil Jaleel, In Jammu and Valley, Phase 2, Indian Express, 25
Sept. 2002, 1.
14. Ibid.; Voters Ink Stains a Requirement in Badgam, Indian Express, 25
Sept. 2002 (internet ed.). Coalition of Civil Society Report: Coercion,
Bogus Polling Alleged, Kashmir Times, 25 Sept. 2002, 1.
15. Jaleel, In Jammu and Valley, Phase 2, and Voters Ink Stains a Requirement in Badgam.
16. Sankarshan Thakur, Farooq Abdullah Pulls Audience from Hat, Then
Talks through It: Is Anybody Listening? Indian Express, 21 Sept. 2002,
1; Tariq Mir and Mufti Islah, Farooq Abdullah Owns Up, Says Sorry at
His Flop Show: Declares Sops, Asks People to Vote without Fear, Indian Express, 21 Sept. 2002 (internet ed.).
17. Muzamil Jaleel, South Kashmir Waits, Campaign Marred by Violence, Indian Express, 30 Sept. 2002 (internet ed.).
18. Muzaffar Raina, Its PDP in Bijbehara, Boycott in Anantnag, Kashmir
Times, 1 Oct. 2002 (internet ed.). Muzaffar Raina, Pahalgam Becomes
a Focus for NC, PDP, Kashmir Times, Sept. 30, 2002, 1. Masood
Hussain, In Kulgam, Marx and God Live Harmoniously, Kashmir
Times, 30 Sept. 2002, 1.

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19. Indian Express, 1 Oct. 2002 (internet ed.).

20. Udayan Namboodiri and Rashid Ahmad, NC May Leave NDA after
Polls: Omar, Hindustan Times, 1 Oct. 2002 (internet ed.).
21. Arun Joshi and Rashid Ahmad, Blood-Spattered Third Round in J&K
Elections, Hindustan Times, 1 Oct. 2002 (internet ed.).
22. Mixed Trends in Valley: Boycott, Coercion, Willing Votes, and Coercion Sparks Protests: Those Boycotting Had Second Option,
Change, Kashmir Times, Oct. 2, 2002, 1. Securitymen Responsible for
Coercion in Phase III Polls: CCS, Kashmir Times, 2 Oct. 2002 (internet
ed.).
23. Nazir Masoodi, Polls No Solution: Omar Abdullah, Indian Express, 1
Oct. 2002, 1. Joshi and Ahmad, NC May Leave NDA after Polls.
Fresh Wave of Terrorist Attacks Sweeps J-K, Indian Express, 2 Oct.
2002 (internet ed.).
24. Barkha Dutt, Vajpayee Postpones Kashmir Visit, NDTV dispatch,
Srinagar, 3 July 2002.
25. See Mitchell, Making Peace.
26. George Mitchell in the Irish Times, 18 and 19 Nov. 1999.
27. Mitchell, Making Peace, 185186.
28. Quoted in Kashmir Times, 23 Aug. 2000, 1.
29. One such member was Krishna Bose, chair of the Parliaments standing committee on external (foreign) affairs.
30. Centre Will Be Compelled to Restore Autonomy: Omar Abdullah,
Hindustan Times, 18 Sept. 2002 (internet ed.).
31. Scott McDonald, Tigers Say They Will Change Stripes, Give Up
Eelam: Substantial Autonomy Rather Than Statehood, Indian Express, 19 Sept. 2002, 1. See also Balasinghams statement at the opening
session of the multi-stage peace talks at www.eelam.com/talks2002/
ab_thai160902.html.
32. LTTE Leader Calls for Autonomy and Self-Government for Tamil
Homeland, LTTE press release, 27 Nov. 2002, accessed 5 Jan. 2003
at www.eelam.com/leader_heroes_day_2002.html. I had urged precisely
such a reconstitution of Sri Lankas state structure in 1994 in my book

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33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.

40.
41.
42.
43.
44.

States, Nations, Sovereignty: Sri Lanka, India and the Tamil Eelam Movement (New Delhi: Sage, 1994), ch. 5.
Amanullah Khan, Free Kashmir (Karachi: Central Printing Press, 1970),
139149.
Balraj Puri, Simmering Volcano: A Study of Jammus Relations with Kashmir (Delhi: Sterling, 1983), Annexure A.
Muftis Autonomy Sop for Ladakh, Hindustan Times, 30 Dec. 2002, 5.
PoK Residents Sceptical about J-K Polls, Indian Express, 18 Sept. 2002
(internet ed.).
See Leo Rose, The Politics of Azad Kashmir, in Raju G. C. Thomas,
ed., Perspectives on Kashmir (Boulder: Westview, 1992).
Sudden Upsurge of Violence in Kashmir Valley, Kashmir Times, 24
Nov. 2002, 1.
Committee for Initiative on Kashmir, A Report on the Condition Of
Mohd. Yasin Malik, A POTA Detainee (New Delhi, Apr. 2002); Yasin
Malik Re-Arrested under PSA after Release on Bail by POTA Court,
Kashmir Times, 21 July 2002, 1.
Nazir Masoodi, The J&K Verdict: In Ganderbal, People Celebrate
NCs Ouster, Indian Express, 10 Oct. 2002 (internet ed.).
See Kashmir Times, 28 Oct. 2002, 1.
Muzamil Jaleel, Terror Strikes J&K Healing Touch: PDP Legislator
Killed after Friday Prayers, Indian Express, 21 Dec. 2002, 1.
Authors personal information from Ved Bhasin and Krishan Deo
Sethi.
Strobe Talbott, Self-Determination in an Inter-Dependent World,
Foreign Policy 118 (Spring 2000), 152163.

GLOSSARY

Abdullah: Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah (19051982), Kashmirs most

important political gure in the twentieth century. Founder
of the NC. Cooperated with India against Pakistan in 1947
1948 and was prime minister of IJK from 1948 to 1953. Deposed by an internal coup supported by New Delhi in 1953,
and spent most of the next twenty-two years in Indian prisons. Restored as chief minister of IJK in 1975 by India in exchange for dropping his self-determination agenda for Kashmir.
AJK: Azad (Free) Jammu and Kashmir. The more populous part
of Pakistani-controlled J&K, with a population of approximately 2.5 million. AJK has six districts: Muzaffarabad,
Mirpur, Bagh, Kotli, Rawalakot, and Poonch. Its capital is
the town of Muzaffarabad. AJK has its own institutions, but
its political life is heavily controlled by Pakistani authorities,
especially the military.
APHC: All-Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference. A coalition,
based in Srinagar, of three dozen groups that stand for the

G L O S S A R Y
292

right to self-determination in Kashmir. Some constituents

have a pro-Pakistan orientation, some have a pro-independence stance, and the position of others is ambiguous.
Formed in 1993, the APHC is ideologically descended from
previous movements in IJK including the PF and the MUF. It
advocates dialogue and negotiations involving India, Pakistan, and APHC representatives as the means to a settlement
of the conict.
Azaadi: Literally, freedom. The rallying cry of supporters of selfdetermination in Kashmir.
BJP: Bharatiya Janata Party, Indian Peoples Party. A party that
calls itself Hindu nationalist and claims to speak for the identity and interests of Indias Hindu majority. Accused by opponents of being sectarian and anti-Muslim, the BJP was a
relatively minor opposition party until 1990, gained wider
support in the 1990s, and has been the leading element of
the coalition government in New Delhi since 1998.
BSF: Border Security Force. The largest component of the vast Indian paramilitary apparatus in IJK, extensively deployed in
urban policing and counterinsurgency operations since 1990.
Congress: The party that led Indias movement for independence from
British colonial rule and dominated independent Indias politics for four decades; now Indias major opposition party.
Congress has been closely identied with the Nehru-Gandhi
family: Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister 19471964; his
daughter Indira Gandhi, prime minister 19661977 and 1980
1984; and her son Rajiv Gandhi, prime minister 19841989.
CRPF: Central Reserve Police Force. The second-largest Indian
paramilitary force deployed in IJK, usually in a less active
combat role than the BSF.

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Dogras: An upper-caste Hindu community found in the plains and

foothills of the Jammu region. A Dogra dynasty founded the
princely state of J&K and ruled it from 1846 to 1947.
Gujjars: A Muslim community in J&K whose traditional occupation
is farming and livestock-rearing in highland areas. There are
sizeable Gujjar concentrations in some parts of both the
Jammu region and the Kashmir Valley.
HM: Hizb-ul Mujahideen. The largest guerrilla organization active
in IJK, and the only one still led by and largely composed of
IJK residents. Formed in 1989, it has a pro-Pakistan orientation and has ideological and organizational links with the
Jamaat-i-Islami, a conservative religious movement active in
IJK, AJK, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
IED: Improvised explosive device. A favorite weapon used by
guerrillas against Indian forces in IJK. These makeshift
bombs and mines are usually placed on roadsides to target
foot patrols, vehicles, and convoys, and are often detonated
by remote control.
IJK: Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir. The larger and more
populous part of the former princely state. It has a population of slightly over 10 million, and comprises three regions:
Kashmir Valley, Jammu, and Ladakh. The Valley and large
tracts of the Jammu region have been sites of guerrilla warfare and Indian counterinsurgency operations since 1990.
ISI: Inter-Services Intelligence. The Pakistani militarys premier
intelligence and covert operations arm, which rose to prominence during General Zia-ul Haqs military dictatorship in
Pakistan (19771988), primarily as the agency coordinating
the U.S.-backed war against the Soviet Union and its allies in

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294

Afghanistan. Deeply involved in supporting and controlling

the insurgency in IJK since the late 1980s.
JeM: Jaish-e-Mohammad. A radical Islamic group centered in Pakistan and active in insurgency in IJK. Formed in early 2000
by Maulana Masood Azhar, a Pakistani cleric, JeM has been
implicated in several major dayeen (suicidal) attacks in IJK,
as well as in the hijacking of an Indian airliner in 1999 and a
suicidal raid on Indias Parliament in 2001. Its members are
also implicated in sectarian Sunni violence against minority
Shia Muslims and Christians in Pakistan, and links with Al
Qaeda are probable. JeM was formally banned in Pakistan in
January 2002.
J&K: Jammu and Kashmir. The former princely state that is the
subject of the Kashmir dispute. Besides IJK and AJK, it includes the sparsely populated Northern Areas of Gilgit
and Baltistan, remote mountainous regions which are directly administered, unlike AJK, by the Pakistani central authorities, and some high-altitude uninhabitable tracts under
Chinese control.
JKLF: Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. A movement founded
in the mid-1960s in AJK with the declared aim of reuniting
the entire territory of the former princely state as an independent state. It acquired support in IJK (especially in the
Kashmir Valley) in the late 1980s, and its activists spearheaded the insurrection that began in 1990. By 1993 its dominance of the armed struggle was over, and it ceased guerrilla
activity in IJK in 1994, but it continues to be the voice of independentist ideology in both IJK and AJK. In IJK it is led by
Yasin Malik, a former guerrilla leader, and is one of the major constituents of the APHC.

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295

LeT: Lashkar-e-Taiba. An insurgent group active in IJK since the

mid-1990s, spawned by a Pakistan-based movement professing an ultra-orthodox variant of Sunni Islam. Like JeM, LeT
is predominantly composed of Pakistani religious radicals;
its leader is Haz Muhammad Sayeed, a Pakistani academic
turned fundamentalist activist. LeT cadres have been responsible for the majority of dayeen attacks in IJK since 1999,
and are the prime suspects in a number of massacres of nonMuslim civilians. Along with JeM, LeT was formally banned
in Pakistan in January 2002.
LOC: Line of Control. The 740-kilometer dividing line between
IJK and AJKNorthern Areas. It originated in January 1949 as
a ceasere line at the end of the rst India-Pakistan war, was
slightly altered during the December 1971 war, and was renamed the Line of Control by intergovernmental agreement
in July 1972. To the south of the LOC lie another 200 kilometers of working boundary between Indian Jammu and Pakistans Punjab province. At its northern end, the LOC terminates at a point called NJ 9842 in the high Himalayas,
beyond which lies a glacial region, Siachen, contested between Indian and Pakistani forces and then Chinese territory.
MC: Muslim Conference. The AllJammu and Kashmir Muslim
Conference was Kashmirs rst political party, founded in
1932. It was absorbed into the NC in 1939, but was revived two
years later. It assumed a pro-Pakistan orientation during the
1940s, and since 1947 has been the major political formation
in AJK. Its best-known leader is Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan,
who has been both prime minister and president of AJK.
MUF: Muslim United Front. An ad hoc coalition of disparate
groups, based mostly in the Kashmir Valley, formed to con-

G L O S S A R Y
296

test elections in IJK in 1987 in opposition to an alliance of the

NC and Congress. That election was massively rigged, and
many young men who worked as volunteers for MUF subsequently turned to guerrilla war against Indian authority with
Pakistani support.
NC: National Conference. The AllJammu and Kashmir National
Conference, formed in 1939 under the leadership of Sheikh
Mohammad Abdullah, has historically been the dominant
party in the Kashmir Valley. It led the popular movement
against the Dogra rulers, and its rst government (19481953)
implemented major land reforms in IJK. In 1953 the NC was
taken over by New Delhisponsored politicians, and
Abdullahs followers formed the PF. When Abdullah returned as IJKs chief minister in 1975, he reappropriated the
NC. In the 1980s its mass base was severely eroded under the
leadership of his son Farooq Abdullah, and it was further
marginalized after the guerrilla revolt began in 1990. The
party returned to head a government in IJK in 1996 after dubious elections, and it became identied with incompetence,
corruption, and brutal counterinsurgency tactics. In IJKs
late-2002 elections the NC suffered a humiliating defeat. It is
still the major opposition within IJKs spectrum of pro-India
parties, but it is only a shadow of the mass-based force it
once was.
Pandits: The Kashmir Valleys small (4 percent) Hindu minority. Most
Kashmiri Pandits left the Valley for Jammu city or Delhi after
insurrection gripped the Valley in 1990, although some
Pandits have continued to live in their Valley homeland.
PC: Peoples Conference. A political party formed in the Kashmir
Valley in the late 1970s, initially to provide an opposition to
the NC. The party was part of the MUF in 1987 and has

G L O S S A R Y
297

been a member of the Hurriyat Conference since the latters

formation in 1993. Its strength is largely conned to the Valleys northern Kupwara district. Its founder, the moderate
self-determination advocate Abdul Ghani Lone, was assassinated in Srinagar, probably by pro-Pakistan militants, in 2002.
PDP: Peoples Democratic Party. A party formed in IJK in 1999 under the leadership of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, formerly a
leader of Indias Congress party in the Kashmir Valley. The
PDP presented itself as a reformist, pro-people party, occupying a middle ground between the APHC and the NC. It
rapidly gained popularity, especially in the Valley, mainly because of Sayeeds daughter Mehbooba Mufti, an outspoken
advocate of human and civil rights. In the late-2002 IJK elections the PDP won 16 of 46 electoral constituencies in the
Valley and Sayeed became IJKs chief minister, heading an
uneasy coalition government with Congress. The PDPs
agenda is to implement liberalizing reforms and normalizing
measures in IJK, in the hope of paving the way for an eventual peace process involving India, Pakistan, and all segments
of political opinion in IJK.
PF: Plebiscite Front. An organization formed in Srinagar by
Abdullahs supporters in 1955, after the sheikh was deposed
and imprisoned for challenging New Delhi and the NC was
taken over by India-supported politicians. The PF sought respect for civil liberties, an inclusive political system, and
above all, a resolution of the self-determination question either through a referendum under U.N. auspices or through
an India-Pakistan peace process with the participation of
J&Ks diverse political forces. Although harassed and occasionally outlawed by India and its client IJK governments,
the PF was a mass-based movement in IJK between 1955 and
1975, especially in the Kashmir Valley.

G L O S S A R Y
298

RR: Rashtriya (National) Ries. Regular Indian army troops deployed since the early 1990s on full-time counterinsurgency
operations in IJK. Four RR formations of over 10,000 soldiers
each operate in IJK, two in the Valley and two in the Jammu
region.
RSS: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, National Volunteer Organization. The ideological and organizational core of the
group of organizations, including BJP, that make up Indias
Hindu nationalist movement. It has several million members
across India.
SOG: Special Operations Group. A specialized counter-terrorism
police force, consisting of IJK residents including former
guerrillas, which became a byword for criminality and brutality during the term in ofce (19962002) of the NC government. One of the most popular campaign pledges of the
PDP in the late-2002 elections was to disband the SOG, and
after assuming ofce the PDP-led government moved to curtail its power and activities.
UJC: United (Muttahida) Jihad Council. An umbrella coalition of
over a dozen tanzeems (guerrilla groups) active in IJK. It is
based in Muzaffarabad, the capital of AJK.
VHP: Vishwa Hindu Parishad, World Hindu Council. The most
openly extreme of Indias sectarian Hindu groups, motivated
by a violently anti-Muslim agenda. It functions as a far-right
pressure group in Indian politics, has dedicated cadres, and
raises funds from its network of overseas supporters, particularly in the United States.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank a few people who have, directly or indirectly, helped my work on Kashmir over the years: Mr. Ved Bhasin, a true
inspiration, and the Bhasin family of Jammu; Mr. Imtiyaz Ahmed So and
the So family of Qamarwari, Srinagar, and Handwara, north Kashmir;
Yasin, Amina, and the Malik family of Maisuma, Srinagar; and Mrs.
Krishna Bose, MP, and the Bose family of Calcutta and Delhi.

INDEX

Abdullah, Farooq, 26, 47, 9092, 9396,

102, 108, 138, 199, 232, 238
Abdullah, Omar, 26, 199, 231, 232, 236
237, 245
Abdullah, Sheikh, 7374, 75, 90, 91, 92,
93, 96, 103, 117, 135, 157, 189, 199, 200,
231, 238, 244, 252; and movement
against Dogra monarchy, 18, 19, 20,
21, 22, 23, 24, 26; and land reform, 27
29; and 1947 events in Kashmir, 34,
3638; criticism of Indian repression
by, 4447; subversion of democracy
by (19481953), 5357; and negotiations with Delhi on Kashmirs status,
5965; ouster as Kashmir prime minister (1953), 6568; release from
prison (19641965), 8081, 83; release
from prison (1968), 8687; return to
ofce (1975), 8889
Advani, L. K., 123, 188, 260
Afghanistan, 22, 111, 125, 126127, 135,
162, 206
Agha Shahid Ali, 6
Aksai Chin, 76

Al-Badr, 105, 106, 150

Al-Barq, 125
Aligarh Muslim University, 18
Al-Jehad, 125, 131, 133, 136
All-Parties Hurriyat Conference. See
Hurriyat Conference
Al-Umar Mujahideen, 126
Anantnag, 85, 87, 94, 96, 109, 118, 127,
132, 134, 189, 232235
Andrabi, Jaleel, 136137
Annan, Ko, 167, 201202
Armitage, Richard, 202
Article 356 (of Indian constitution), 81,
83, 93, 108
Article 370 (of Indian constitution), 45,
59, 68, 6970, 82, 88, 187, 188, 189
190, 191
Ayodhya, 123
Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam, 22, 65
Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), 2, 3,
10, 11, 12, 23, 28, 34, 35, 38, 50, 55, 63,
84, 104, 105, 116, 117, 125, 129, 144, 148,
149, 150, 151, 152, 160, 161, 163, 168,
169, 170, 180, 183, 184, 192, 203, 224,

I N D E X
302

Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK)

(continued)
246, 251; proclamation of provisional
government (1947), 33; after India-Pakistan ceasere (1949), 41; political
conditions, 99100; relationship with
Pakistani state, 254255; future relations with Indian Kashmir, 261264
Azhar, Maulana Masood, 106, 127, 278
279n23
Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, 23, 37, 65
66, 6869, 72, 75, 7778, 81, 86, 87, 92
Baltistan, 15, 41, 192
Bandipore, 141, 194, 196
Bangladesh, 8, 89, 100
Banihal pass, 37, 4546, 119
Baramulla, 35, 37, 38, 84, 96, 109, 113, 127,
134, 138, 189, 194200, 229
Bazaz, Prem Nath, 9, 14, 16, 84
Beg, Afzal, 23, 61, 65, 66, 7374, 80, 87,
88
Beigh, Muzaffar, 261
Bengal, 79
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 120, 123,
185, 188, 189, 202, 219, 248. See also
Hindu nationalists
Bhasin, Ved, 261
Bogra, Mohammed Ali, 42, 70, 179
Border Security Force (BSF), 109, 112,
115, 119, 128, 136, 141, 154, 236, 237
Bosnia, 13, 173176, 182
Bush, George W., 202
Butt, Maqbool, 9596, 104, 120, 158, 199.
See also Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front
Central Intelligence Agency, 125
Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF),
92, 109, 110, 112, 118, 122, 146, 159

Charar-e-Sharief, 115, 134, 135, 232

Chaudhary Ghulam Abbas, 20, 21, 29
China, 206; and Kashmir conict, 76
77, 83
Clinton, Bill, 3, 141, 220
Congress party, 21, 22, 23, 29, 3031, 33,
58, 70, 82, 85, 86, 87, 89, 92, 93, 103,
157158, 198, 248; alliance with NC in
1987 IJK elections, 4849, 94; in 1982
IJK elections, 9091; alliance with
PDP in IJK (2002), 260
Cyprus, 13

Dahl, Robert, 11
Dar, Abdul Majid, 127, 239, 244
Dar, Ahsan, 127
Dar, Aijaz, 95
Defence of India Rules, 81, 83, 86
Delhi accord (1975), 8889, 91, 93
Delhi agreement (1952), 45, 6162, 244
245
Democratic National Conference, 77
Doda, 6364, 88, 115, 118119, 131, 137,
147148, 149, 150, 155, 172, 183, 185186,
191, 256

European Union (EU), 174, 177, 213,

219

dayeen tactics, in Kashmir insurgency,

107, 118, 123, 135, 140147, 227, 228

Gandhi, Indira, 84, 87, 88, 9092, 96

Gandhi, Rajiv, 92, 108
Geelani, Syed Ali Shah, 170, 239, 258
Gilgit, 15, 41, 60, 192, 251
Gilgit and Baltistan, 169, 251

I N D E X
303

Glancy commission, 1920

Gujarat, 228
Gujjars, 10, 118, 148, 149, 150, 156158,
172, 182, 184, 197, 231
Gulmarg, 137, 199200
Guru, Dr. Abdul Ahad, 132

Halwai, Yusuf, 96
Hamid Sheikh, 103, 104, 128
Handwara, 37, 5153, 94, 115, 158, 196,
197198
Haq, General Zia-ul, 125
Harkat-ul Ansar (HuA), 127, 135, 142
Harkat-ul-Jehad-i-Islami, 150
Harkat-ul Mujahideen, 150
Hazratbal, 24, 34, 7879, 83, 129
Hindu nationalists, and Kashmir conict, 58, 62, 70, 82, 84, 85, 186193,
227, 253, 260. See also Bharatiya Janata
Party
Hizb-ul Mujahideen (HM), 3, 50, 99,
106, 119, 230, 231, 233, 236, 237, 240,
243244, 256, 265; Pakistani sponsorship of, 127; in Kashmir guerrilla war
(1990), 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136,
139, 143, 144, 150, 158, 160, 162, 163
Horowitz, Donald, 84
Hurriyat Conference, 4, 52, 131, 135, 138,
143, 160, 170, 194, 197, 199, 234, 239
240, 258
Hyderabad, 16, 30

Ikhwan-ul Muslimeen, 126, 136

Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), 244,
283n66; involvement in Kashmir insurgency, 125127
intifada, 109, 111, 145
Irish Republican Army (IRA), 209210,
222, 241243

Jagmohan, 92, 93, 108, 120

Jaish-e-Mohammad ( JeM), 106, 142143,
145146, 150, 154, 155, 157
Jamaat-i-Islami ( JI), 48, 87, 99, 127, 130,
131, 162
Jamiat-ul Mujahideen, 159
Jammu (city), 18, 36, 37, 40, 56, 60, 78,
87, 119, 120, 121, 124, 143144, 147, 148,
150, 152, 188, 191, 203, 204, 206, 230,
237, 252, 253, 256, 260, 261
Jammu (region), 4, 15, 20, 27, 28, 31, 45,
75, 78, 81, 90, 93, 105, 107, 118, 131, 134,
137, 138, 143, 144, 147, 150, 152, 181, 183,
184, 185, 230, 248, 256; diversity of, 9
10, 12, 172; communal killings (1947),
40; agitation against Abdullah government, 5558, 60, 6264; separate
statehood movement, 187, 188, 189
191; future relations with Kashmir
Valley, 249253
Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front
( JKLF), 19, 52, 158, 160, 170, 171, 199,
239, 243244, 258, 259; in Kashmir
guerrilla war (1989), 3, 50, 95, 96, 99,
103, 104, 106, 107108, 110111, 115, 117,
120, 124, 126, 127, 128134, 136, 139; in
AJK, 100, 254255; views on independent Jammu and Kashmir, 169, 251
Jammu and Kashmir Peoples National
Party, 255
Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act,
204, 258
Jinnah, Mohammed Ali, 22, 31, 34, 36
Junagadh, 16, 30

Kargil, 41, 181, 184, 192193, 194, 230, 253;

1999 conict in, 37, 42, 141, 227, 267n1,
271n34, 280n42
Karra, Ghulam Mohiuddin, 23, 56, 79
Kashmir Study Group, 284n12

I N D E X
304

Khan, Amanullah, 99100, 126, 251

Khan, Ayub, 80
Khan, Khan Abdul Ghaffar, 22
Khan, Liaquat Ali, 34, 38, 42, 179
Khatib, Nadeem, 102, 104107, 140, 146
Kishtwar, 63, 115, 118119, 131, 148, 185
186, 191
Korbel, Josef, 23, 55
Kupwara, 51, 52, 104, 113, 115, 125, 131,
147, 158160, 194199, 230, 240

Ladakh, 15, 41, 55, 77, 85, 90, 93, 118, 138,
141, 181, 184, 227, 230; diversity of, 10,
191193; agitation against Abdullah
government, 57, 62, 63; India-China
border clashes (1962), 76; Buddhist
separatist agitation, 187, 188, 189; future position in IJK self-rule framework, 249253
Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development
Council, 253
Ladakh Buddhist Association, 192
Lahore, 15, 18, 140, 141, 142
Lahore declaration (1999), 140, 226227,
228
Lamb, Alastair, 18
Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), 106, 142144,
146147, 150, 153, 158, 160, 228229
Lawrence, Walter, 16
Leh, 41, 188189, 191193, 252253
Line of Control (LOC), 2, 10, 11, 51, 63,
83, 95, 99, 103, 104, 105, 107, 111, 112,
113, 116, 117, 118, 125, 126, 129, 137, 141,
143, 147, 148149, 151152, 155156, 158,
160, 163, 166, 172, 203, 204, 207, 227,
230, 241, 254, 271n34; origins, 41; conversion into international border,
178180; redrawing, 180183; status
under Simla agreement, 225; transformation of, 261264

Linz, Juan, 98
Lok Sabha, 82, 85, 9293, 9697
Lone, Abdul Ghani, 52, 53, 94, 197, 199

Malik, Yasin, 4951, 99, 103, 128, 130, 135,

146, 171, 239, 243, 258. See also Jammu
and Kashmir Liberation Front
Mandela, Nelson, 201
Masoodi, Maulana, 24, 64, 66, 79, 80,
231
Mir, Javed, 103, 129, 130
Mirpur, 12, 33, 40, 151, 169, 203, 261
Mirwaiz Farooq, 79, 132
Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, 239
Mitchell, George J., 220, 242
Mountbatten, Lord, 30, 36
Mufti, Mehbooba, 198, 234, 261
Mufti, Mohammad Sayeed, 93, 198, 239,
253, 260261. See also Peoples Democratic Party
Musharraf, Pervez, 1, 42, 141, 143, 144,
145, 163, 168, 179, 181182, 227
Muslim Conference (MC), 20, 21, 22, 29,
31, 55, 255
Muslim League, 21, 22, 29, 33
Muslim United Front (MUF), 4849, 94,
9899, 102, 132
Muzaffarabad, 32, 35, 40, 151, 163, 254,
261

Narayan, Jayaprakash, 84
National Conference (NC), 22, 2329,
46, 52, 53, 54, 62, 64, 65, 74, 7576, 78,
79, 85, 86, 89, 92, 96, 102103, 108, 115,
117, 138, 159, 161, 169, 170, 192; formation of, 2021; and Naya Kashmir
manifesto (1944), 2526; and land reform in Kashmir, 2728; in 1947
Kashmir events, 31, 32, 33, 37, 38; in

I N D E X
305

1987 IJK elections, 4749, 9394; and

19481953 IJK regime, 5558; takeover
(1953) by New Delhi-backed politicians, 6667; merger with Congress
party, 8283; in 1982 IJK elections,
9091; and 2002 IJK elections, 196
200, 231234, 236, 240; and autonomy
for IJK, 244245, 248
Naya Kashmir manifesto, 2527, 56
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 2122, 23, 3536, 38,
42, 45, 46, 5657, 58, 60, 61, 65, 66, 69,
7072, 73, 78, 80, 8283, 92, 167, 178
179, 244
Northern Areas, 2, 41, 63, 76, 169, 192,
251
Northern Ireland, 13; peace framework
and process in, 176177, 210215, 241
243, 259; history of conict in, 208
210; similarities with Kashmir, 215
217; differences with Kashmir, 217
221; lessons for Kashmir peace process, 221223
North-West Frontier Province (NWFP),
22, 31, 32, 33, 40, 41, 125, 151, 162; and
1947 tribal invasion of Kashmir, 35
38

Pakistan resolution, 21, 31

Palestinian-Israeli peace process, failure
of, 216, 222223
Pandits, 12, 20, 21, 64, 76, 93, 96, 108,
172, 187, 189, 190, 249, 258; exodus
from Kashmir Valley of, 119124
Parray, Kuka, 197
partitionist approaches to Kashmir dispute, 178193
Patel, Sardar Vallabhbhai, 31, 35, 60
Peoples Conference (PC), 5253, 125,
197198, 239240
Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), 198,

199200, 231234, 240, 248, 253, 258

261
Peoples League, 89, 96, 125, 159, 170
Pir Panjal, 150
plebiscitary approaches to Kashmir dispute, 165177
plebiscite, in Kashmir, 39, 40, 54, 59, 64,
67, 71, 87, 166173, 240
Plebiscite Front (PF), 73, 83, 86, 87, 88,
89, 91, 97, 117, 170, 231
Poonch, 34, 60, 64, 95, 107, 118, 137, 172,
183, 184185, 191, 194, 203, 230, 256;
1947 rebellion in, 3233; recent and
current guerrilla warfare in, 147
158
Praja Parishad, 5558, 60, 61, 75, 77, 78,
82, 189
Praja Socialist Party (PSP), 72, 78, 85
Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA),
258, 259
princely state of Jammu and Kashmir,
1416
princely states of India, 3031
Puri, Balraj, 5657, 72, 83, 251252

Qasim, Mir, 23, 67, 77, 80, 82, 85, 86, 87,
89
Qazi Nissar, 94, 132
Quebec, 176
Quit India movement (1942), 22, 29
Quit Kashmir movement (1946), 2627,
29, 56, 159

Rajouri, 41, 64, 107, 118, 137, 172, 183,

184185, 191, 194, 230, 256; recent and
current guerrilla warfare in, 147
158
Rashtriya Ries (RR), 134, 137, 146, 153,
200

I N D E X
306

Rawalpindi, 32, 33, 34, 151, 251

renegades, in Kashmir guerrilla war,
133134, 136, 138, 139

Sadiq, G. M., 23, 25, 37, 65, 73, 77, 78, 80

82, 84, 85
Salahuddin, Syed, 50, 99, 127, 139, 230.
See also Hizb-ul Mujahideen
Sayeed, Haz Muhammad, 106
Shah, Afaq, 146
Shah, Ghulam Mohammed, 87, 9193,
164
Shah, Shabbir, 89, 96, 135, 239, 250
Shamsuddin, Khwaja, 77, 78, 80, 85
Sharif, Nawaz, 3, 140141, 227
Sheikh, Abdul Aziz, 131, 239
Sheikh, Ahmed Omar Saeed, 278
279n23
Sialkot, 34, 150
Simla agreement (1972), 178, 225226,
228
Singh, Gulab, 15, 16
Singh, Hari, 16, 26
Singh, Karan, 54, 66, 92
Singh, Ranjit, 15
Sinn Fein, 222, 241243
Skardu, 41
Sopore, 25, 96, 109, 115, 189, 194
South Africa, 201, 249
South Asian Association for Regional
Cooperation (SAARC), 220, 227
Soviet Union, and Kashmir dispute, 65,
7072
Special Operations Group (SOG),
134, 147, 154, 158, 160, 200, 257, 258,
259
Sri Lanka, 111, 145; peace process in, 217,
218, 221, 246248
Srinagar, 17, 18, 19, 24, 26, 29, 35, 36, 37,

38, 41, 47, 53, 54, 56, 70, 7879, 80, 83,
84, 86, 87, 92, 94, 95, 96, 102, 103, 104,
105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113,
114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124,
125, 126, 128, 131, 132, 134, 135, 137, 138,
139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 159,
160, 161, 170, 187, 189, 206, 228, 230,
231232, 234, 236, 244, 245, 250, 252
253, 254, 256, 260

Talbott, Strobe, 262

Tehreek-ul Mujahideen, 150
Tibet, 76, 206
Treaty of Amritsar, 15, 16, 26
Tyndale Biscoe, C. E., 9, 17, 18

Udhampur, 96, 107, 119, 146, 150, 183,

191, 256
United Jihad Council, 163, 228229
United Nations, and Kashmir dispute,
3839, 40, 54, 57, 59, 64, 72, 74, 84, 166,
167, 168, 169, 201202
United Nations Commission for India
and Pakistan (UNCIP), 23, 3839, 54,
55, 166
United Nations Military Observer
Group for India and Pakistan
(UNMOGIP), 166
United States: and Kashmir dispute, 70
71, 76, 144, 167, 202, 227, 265; and
Northern Ireland peace process,
220
Uri, 38, 113, 197

Vajpayee, Atal Behari, 1, 140, 144145

Village Defence Committees (VDC),
152

I N D E X
307

Wanchoo, Hriday Nath, 132

Wani, Ashfaq Majid, 102107, 128, 146

Yugoslavia, former, 173175, 193. See also

Bosnia

Xinjiang, 76, 206

Zargar, Mushtaq, 126, 278279n23

Zojila pass, 41